Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  In the wake of her mother’s death, she had been too incapacitated to make plans, so she and Julian stayed in Northington. She waitressed three nights a week at an Italian restaurant downtown, and during the day she worked at the Graymont registrar’s office, up the hill from where she and Julian lived. Julian took a bartending course, and soon he was serving drinks to the students whose transcripts she was processing. At home, he put his new skills to use, making cocktails for him and Mia, dropping paper umbrellas he had purloined from the bar into drinks the color of gumballs. He would place his hands behind his back, one drink in each, and say, “Choose a hand,” and the hand Mia picked would hold her drink for the day.

  “Quiz me,” he said.

  “What’s in a Harvey Wallbanger?”

  “One ounce vodka, four ounces orange juice, half an ounce Galliano.”

  “And an Alabama Slammer?”

  “One ounce sloe gin, one ounce Southern Comfort, three ounces orange juice, one ounce amaretto.”

  “Make me something blue,” Mia said, and Julian mixed her a drink he’d never made before, something that, for all she knew, he had contrived at that moment, but it tasted good either way. “What’s that?”

  “A Julian Wallbanger.”

  The next day he told her was serving her an Alabama Mendelsohn.

  “My very own drink.” But it tasted remarkably like a Harvey Wallbanger to her, and when she pressed him, Julian admitted it was a Harvey Wallbanger and he’d simply changed the name.

  In bed at night, they read novels to each other, and once, when Mia had the late shift and wasn’t coming home until after he went to sleep, Julian called the restaurant and read to her over the telephone. Mia laughed, pretending she was writing down a take-out order, but when her boss began to stare at her she said she had to go.

  Waiting up for her, Julian would flip through the student transcripts she had brought home. He invented a game in which she would read aloud from the students’ application essays and letters of recommendation and he would try to guess their college major. Then she would open The Northington Free Press and describe the houses that had been sold, and he would attempt to guess the sale price. A couple of times he got the price right and he thrust his arms in the air and declared himself the real-estate king, as if by guessing the correct price he’d won the house itself.

  Then Mia would feel bad because how, she wondered, if her mother had just died, could she be playing games like these? Already there were times when she was happy, when she and Julian would look out the window of their apartment, hearing the quiet vibration of traffic on the street, and she’d be filled with serenity. In bed with Julian as he read to her, or drinking the cocktails he’d mixed, or simply flipping through take-out menus, she’d be overcome not by joy, exactly, but by something quieter than that, a contentment she felt most profoundly when doing something as inconsequential as choosing take-out orders. But this feeling didn’t last long because contentment, she believed, was a betrayal of her mother. She wanted to move on, yet every sign that she’d done so compelled her to turn back.

  Now, at Red Hot Lovers, she picked at her French fries, trailing them through a puddle of ketchup. Out the window, a man was shouting into a microphone. A born-again. There was a rotation of them, warning people of impending doom.

  Behind the counter, the cook was dropping French fries into sizzling oil. One of the hazards, Mia thought, of having been a waitress was that you could never eat out innocently again. Once, at the restaurant where she’d worked, a fellow waiter had tasted the melted cheese on a customer’s onion soup, and when he handed the soup to the customer, a long filament of cheese ran from the soup bowl to the waiter’s mouth. The man the waiter was serving turned out to be the provost of Graymont, and the next day the waiter was fired. “Poor Ian,” Julian said. “Caught with the provost’s cheese in his mouth.” After that, Julian would pretend he was Ian, and he would serve Mia a salad for dinner and stand with a napkin over his shoulder and a piece of romaine lettuce dangling from his mouth.

  Mia gestured in the direction of another table, where two students were eating lunch. “Do you hear their accents?”

  Julian smiled at her. It was Mia who was always telling him he was an East Coast snob, the New Yorker who thought there was nowhere but New York. Those initial months in Ann Arbor, that whole first year, in fact, she’d felt obliged to be a Michigan booster, for they had come to Ann Arbor because of her and he’d agreed to the move only reluctantly. Even now, she found herself pointing out how good their life was, as if obliged to defend Michigan’s virtues.

  Still, it was hard to get used to those Michigan accents.

  “You’re one to talk,” Julian said. He liked to make fun of Mia’s Canadian accent, how she said “Montreal” as if it were spelled “Muntreal.” “Muntreal,” he would say. “Like Muenster cheese.”

  Mia looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said. She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth.

  It was a sunny December morning, and Julian was seated in Caribou Coffee, holding office hours. His students’ final papers were due next week and he’d made the mistake of having them write first drafts, so he now had to read two papers from everyone, and there were eighteen students in his class.

  When someone asked him what he was doing in Ann Arbor, Julian liked to say he was the Merry House Husband. Student spouse, he called himself, for that was how he gained access to the college gym and purchased tickets to Michigan basketball games. But the truth was, he was now an official employee of the University of Michigan; he was teaching a section of English composition and was scheduled to teach another next semester. He should have been grateful, for the rest of the composition instructors were graduate students in English and all he had was a bachelor’s degree. It was official university policy not to allow people like him to teach undergraduates, but official university policy, he discovered, was one thing in February, another thing in August, and when enrollment spiked over the summer the chair of the English department turned to him.

  He had been given an office, a cubicle in the basement of Angell Hall, which he shared with the other composition instructors, whose job was to negotiate among themselves who would hold office hours when. But it was dark and cold in the basement of Angell, and Julian wanted to dissociate himself from the university, from the very idea that he was a composition instructor. He believed a writer was supposed “to live,” which in his mind meant “to do manual labor,” to work on a construction crew or on a fishing boat and get up before dawn to write. The problem was, he didn’t have much experience with manual labor and, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t good at it.

  Worse, he was a stickler for good grammar and proper syntax and he feared he was well suited for the job. The head of the composition program had been at it for twenty-five years, and whenever Julian saw him in the elevator, his brow etched with fatigue, his right shoulder slightly lower than his left from having carried his briefcase for so many years, he saw a future version of himself.

  His first three years in town, Julian had worked at Shaman Drum Bookshop on State Street. At Shaman Drum, he stocked books and tended to the register and, along with a graduate student in art history, helped run the bookstore’s readings series. Down Liberty Street was Borders Books, and during breaks from writing, Julian would check out the “New Fiction” section at Borders, then stop in at Shaman Drum to greet his old coworkers. Standing in front of the W’s, he would picture his own book there; listening to someone read at Shaman Drum, he would imagine himself reading. But no sooner would he do this than he would rebuke himself. Fantasies were for fools, he believed; the only thing that mattered was hard work. Superstitiously, he told himself that the way to succeed was to believe you wouldn’t, that only someone convinced of failure had a chance of success.

  At the next table, another composition instructor was meeting a student, and beyond her sat two English graduate students holding novels on their laps. Each departm
ent commandeered a café. The English graduate students were at Caribou, the anthropologists at Gratzi, the historians at Espresso Royale. Everyone would remain at their appointed location, and then, after a few months, they would tire of it and, like migratory birds, they’d move on.

  It was ten-fifteen, and Trilby, Julian’s favorite student, was late to meet him. This surprised him, for Trilby was generally so punctual he worried something had happened to her.

  Then Trilby breezed in, clapping her mittens against each other, tall, august, walking briskly between the tables, removing a wool cap to reveal an unfurling cascade of blond curls, her cheeks pale with little blotches of ruddiness, her eyes the blue of agate. “Julian, I’m so sorry.”

  “Dog ate your homework?”

  “What if I told you it was the cat?” A number of times, Trilby had regaled Julian with stories about her roommate’s cat, who seemed to function metonymically for Trilby’s roommate herself: high-pitched, sharp-taloned, venomous. Trilby placed her bookbag on the table. “Actually, I was taking care of Helene.”

  “Ah,” Julian said, “the roommate.” Then, fearing he’d been insensitive, he said, “Is she all right?”

  “She’ll live,” Trilby said.

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  “I had to take her to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. I’ve never met a person who vomits so much. When it’s not beer, it’s bulimia.”

  “My wife’s studying to be a psychologist,” Julian said.

  “No offense to your wife, but Helene needs more help than that. If I were her parents, I’d cart her back home to Wisconsin.”

  Julian didn’t doubt Trilby was telling the truth. But she was also, he suspected, capable of embellishment; she was a born raconteur. Besides, her account squared too neatly with her own prejudices, so that her roommate—the subsisting on Diet Coke, the passing out at fraternity parties, the waking up with guys she couldn’t recall having met—seemed less like an actual person than a stand-in for everything she disapproved of at college.

  Trilby had grown up outside Syracuse (“Every place I’ve lived,” she told Julian once, “it’s been snowy and cold”), with a poet mother (Julian had seen a few of Trilby’s mother’s poems in The New Yorker) and a painter father. Her parents had named her Trilby after the character in the Du Maurier novel, which, she told Julian, her friends would have thought was a joke, if only they’d understood it. “No one reads where I come from,” Trilby said, and when Julian, only half kidding, said, “No one reads where I come from, either,” Trilby said, “No, you don’t understand.”

  In Trilby’s high school, there had been nothing to do but have sex and watch football. (Trilby had grown up in a town that lived for high school football. “And that was the adults,” she told Julian. She was so impassioned in her aversion to sports that Julian didn’t have the heart to admit he was a sports fan himself.) And so she’d done her best to play along. But when she was a senior, she applied early to the University of Chicago, because it was a good school, but also because in a ranking of party schools it had come in dead last.

  Yet as soon as she got to Chicago, she was miserable. The weather was freezing, she told Julian, but in a different way from how it was freezing back home, and Hyde Park felt rarefied and alien. She stayed in Chicago for three semesters, then spent the next couple of years bumming around Europe. First in Stockholm and then in a small town an hour outside Oslo, she worked off the books as a bar waitress. Finally, when she returned to the United States, she decided to enroll at the University of Michigan. It was a good school and she was used to the cold, and Michigan accepted her credits from Chicago without hassle or complaint.

  “But then you were forced to study with me,” Julian said.

  “I wouldn’t say forced.”

  “I would.”

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. “But it’s been the best thing that’s happened to me.”

  The first time she came to Julian’s office hours, Trilby was surprised, she admitted, to be enrolled in composition. Even if she’d been a freshman, she would have regarded composition with barely suppressed disdain. She had placed out of composition at the University of Chicago, and this, paradoxically, was what prevented her from placing out of it at the University of Michigan, which wasn’t interested in giving her credit for work she’d done in high school. But now she was a junior, having spent two years abroad, which made her four years older than the rest of Julian’s students. She was closer to his age than to theirs, and this flustered him. Or maybe it was the fact that she was so pretty and he, as the teacher, wasn’t supposed to notice. He worried the other students would think he was playing favorites, but at a certain point it became comical: whom else was he supposed to favor? Trilby was so much better than her classmates that they appeared to regard her as Julian’s assistant. It was possible she was a genius, he thought. It was also possible she just seemed that way compared with his other students, who were respectful and well-meaning and by and large not unintelligent but next to whom Trilby appeared as enormous—she was, in fact, five ten—as Lionel Trilling.

  Perhaps, Julian thought, Trilby looked at him the same way. Maybe she was comparing him with the rest of the room and not to her other professors. Whatever the reason, instead of resenting him, as he thought she might, she had come to respect him, to like him, even, and he, in turn, liked her back.

  Yet too often he would forget that she was his student and there were things he wasn’t supposed to say to her. Trilby seemed to encourage this; it was as if she wanted him to cross a line. Now, sitting across from him at the café, she said, “Can you believe class yesterday?”

  “So you thought things got out of hand?”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Chalk it up to December. Everyone’s got vacation on the brain.”

  “College,” Trilby mused. “It brings out the solipsist in the best of us.”

  “And sometimes not the best of us,” Julian said, and there he was again, having been drawn into Trilby’s trap, commenting unfavorably on his students.

  The purpose of Julian’s course was to teach the students essay writing: how to come up with a thesis statement and defend it, how to write an introduction and conclusion, how to make good transitions from paragraph to paragraph. This was, he understood, an important skill, but over the course of the semester it got stultifying to read so many such papers, and so for a few weeks he’d had his students writing personal essays. He had even, one week, encouraged them to write fiction, an idea Trilby had taken him up on, and she’d produced a small, affecting story about a woman whose husband, much younger than she, dies suddenly, a narrative meditation on grieving. Julian copied the story and handed it out to the class, but they hadn’t been impressed.

  “I guess you can’t please everyone all the time,” Trilby said when she next saw Julian in office hours.

  “Don’t listen to them,” Julian said. “That story was terrific.”

  Occasionally, the composition instructors would hold meetings and the conversation would invariably turn to the poor quality of student writing. Julian, who had as much bad writing as anyone else, nonetheless felt self-conscious joining in the lament, a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds complaining about college students. Besides, if anything, he found the student responses to one another’s work more disheartening than the work itself, for it was always the best writing that they appreciated least and the sentimental, cliché-ridden papers they gravitated to. Once, flummoxed by a student’s response, Julian—he would later regret having been so peremptory—simply said, “I’m sorry, Steven, but you’re wrong,” and ended all discussion.

  This was why he decided, after Trilby’s story, that it was best not to continue having his students write fiction, best, even, to discontinue the writing of personal essays, which were near enough cousins to fiction anyway. It was all too close to home, having his students write creatively—he wondered how Professor Chesterfield had managed to do it—and he was torn be
tween being aghast at how bad their work was and worrying that when he was eighteen his own work had been as bad, or, worse, that it still was as bad but that he was too close to what he wrote to realize it.

  Yet even argumentative essays could become personal. Yesterday, discussion had broken down when two football players argued that student athletes should be paid for playing college sports. A drama student said that if student athletes were paid, student actors should be paid as well. Soon everyone was calling out about their own experience, and it was in a brief break in the shouting that Julian heard Trilby murmur, “Enough about me; what do you think about me?”

  Now, at the café, she said, “You know what you should do? Put a moratorium on all first-person pronouns. From now on, no one can use the word ‘I’ in their papers.”

  “If I did that,” Julian said, “there would be other problems.”

  Trilby shrugged. “What would Descartes say if he were alive now? ‘I have an opinion, therefore I am’?”

  “Well, well, well.”

  “I know,” she said. “You should make me go up to the blackboard and write a hundred times, ‘I will not be such a snot-nosed student.’”

  “You’re not snot-nosed.”

  A drop of apple cider hung on Trilby’s lip, and presently she licked it away. She brushed a filament of curls behind her ear, only to have them fall down again. “Do you have other students coming?”

  “The whole crew.”

  “Okay,” she said, “then let’s talk about my paper.”

  “Your paper’s terrific,” he said. “Your first draft is better than other people’s second drafts.”

  She looked at him mildly, as if to say, “Damning with faint praise.”