“All right,” he said, “it’s better than my second draft.”
His response didn’t fluster her. She had confidence, he thought, perhaps too much of it. Earlier in the semester she had written about Roe v. Wade, and though she was pleased with how the Supreme Court had decided, she faulted Justice Blackmun for a weak opinion, the implication being that if she herself had been on the Supreme Court a woman’s right to choose would have been more firmly buttressed. Strong words from a twenty-three-year-old. Yet she had managed to say them without arrogance. There was, in fact, a vulnerability to her, a tentativeness, even, to how she was looking at him now.
She said, “I’m giving myself a crash course in jurisprudence. I’m writing about moral desert. One ‘s,’ not two.” She fingered the handle of her cider mug, tapping it a couple of times.
“I know,” he said. “I read your paper.” He held it up for her to see. It was studded with check marks.
“Humor me,” she said. “Let me revise.”
“Okay,” said Julian. He was all for revision. He believed it separated the real writers from the dilettantes.
Trilby was writing this time about affirmative action and, more broadly, about the idea of merit. She was arguing not simply that university admission wasn’t an entitlement but that human beings didn’t own their endowments, that intelligence and diligence were qualities people exhibited but didn’t in any moral sense deserve. She was using Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Dworkin, some of whom Julian hadn’t read himself.
“So you’re telling me you have seventeen more of these?”
Julian nodded ruefully.
“I’d hate to know your hourly wages.”
“They’re even worse than you think.”
“So why do you do it?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. It was eleven o’clock, and students were passing in and out of the café. It was rush hour, Julian thought, and this was Ann Arbor’s subway.
“Tell me.”
“First of all, my college creative writing professor recommended me.”
“You couldn’t have said no?”
“It would have been hard. This friend of mine thinks something Freudian is going on. That my professor is a father substitute.”
“Is he?”
“It’s possible.”
“And second of all?”
“My wife wanted me to take the job. Which is a long story in its own right.”
A biscuit had come with Trilby’s cider, and she was nibbling at it now, leaving a trail of crumbs across the table. “Sometimes I feel bad that this is what you do, teaching composition to college kids. It seems beneath you.”
“Nothing’s beneath me,” Julian said balefully.
“Oh, come on.”
“I know,” he said. “Self-pity isn’t attractive.”
“Don’t you worry it can infect you? Day after day with the commas and semicolons?”
“It’s my job,” he said. “Besides, I worry I’m good at it. And there’s a beauty to precision, don’t you think?” Trilby of all people had to know what he was saying. From the start, he’d counted on her to give examples to the class. She wrote on the blackboard, “The children who are good will get candy,” followed by “The children, who are good, will get candy,” and explained the difference to everyone. When he lamented his students’ punctuation, when he noted that they reflexively placed commas between adjectives, she wrote, “My first beautiful wife,” followed by “My first, beautiful wife,” and distinguished between the two. Seeing her standing in her black boots and jeans, her blond hair tucked like a scarf into her turtleneck, hearing the sound of the chalk pressed against the blackboard, Julian thought he might be a little in love with her. Trilby was beautiful—how could he not notice?—but in the end she’d won his heart because she knew the difference between “which” and “that.”
“I used to like to diagram sentences,” she said.
Julian thought of his own adventures in sentence diagramming, late at night in his childhood bedroom looking out at the East River. “My wife thinks I’m a schoolmarm,” he said. “I’m the guy reading the Times Magazine who exults when they mistake ‘forego’ for ‘forgo.’”
“At least you’re not a prig about it.”
“I hope I’m not.”
Trilby canted her head as if trying to get a better look at him. Her hair brushed across the table.
“Mia tells me I seduced her with Strunk and White.”
“Did you?”
“I guess I did. On our first date, I gave her the highlights of my childhood malapropisms. ‘No holes barred’ instead of ‘no holds barred.’ ‘For all intensive purposes.’” He shrugged. “I was eighteen.”
“When I was eighteen…” Her voice trailed off.
“What?”
“It’s not even worth going into.” Trilby looked around her, at the clusters of her classmates in repose. “Clearly I’ve come to the wrong college. You should see how guys try to seduce you here.”
By the door, in the shadows, a young man was standing in an orange parka. A student of Julian’s. Trilby rose from her seat. “I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”
“Trilby, come on.”
She was standing above him, holding a mitten in each hand. “You want to know the real reason I was late today?”
“Sure.”
“I was in the Hopwood Room.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where the creative writing program’s offices are. You’ve never been there?”
Julian shook his head.
“They have a whole table of literary journals. I was reading your story. The one in The Missouri Review.”
“It’s in there?”
“I loved it,” she said. “Would you believe me if I told you I cried?”
He was silent for a second.
“Look at you,” she said. “You’re blushing. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cold.” She held up a compact for him to see.
“I don’t take compliments well,” he admitted.
“Well, your story was wonderful,” she said. “I wish I could write something like that.” She wrapped her scarf around her neck and turned to go. “Take care of yourself, Julian.” Then she walked through the café and out the door, disappearing down State Street.
Now another semester was under way, another composition class, another set of papers. Occasionally Julian ran into Trilby on the street and they stopped to talk for a few minutes. “You’ve spoiled me,” he said. “My students this semester seem like dolts.”
“Probably because they are,” Trilby said, and then, seeming sorry for having been so uncharitable, she said, “I’m sure you have some good ones.”
One time she suggested they get coffee, but so far, at least, they hadn’t done so, and the more time passed, the less likely it seemed that they would. Now, when they greeted each other on the street, they rarely stopped to talk.
It was February. Snow piled high on the ground, and Julian, who had finally managed to liberate his and Mia’s car, had, after the last storm, capitulated to the drifts. The apartment building they lived in had sixteen apartments but only eight parking spots, and now that he’d secured one, he considered leaving the car there for the rest of the winter, which in Ann Arbor could run well into April; eight inches of snow had fallen on April Fool’s Day last year. Their car looked, Julian thought, like a woolly mammoth. All the cars in town did, rows of mammals frozen in mid-step, these lumps lining State Street and South University, an occasional headlight protruding. “We should just blowtorch the car and ride around in snowmobiles.”
“It’s not the snow that I mind,” Mia said. “It’s how gray everything is.” At the clinic, there had been a rash of new patients. Second-semester blues, Mia’s supervisor said. Mia wondered whether it was seasonal affective disorder; she hadn’t seen blue sky in over a week. Sit under a sun lamp and call me in the morning. That had been the joke going around the clinic.
“I’m not crazy about the snow, either,” Julian said. Even as a child, he’d looked forward to snow only in the hope, usually dashed, that school would be closed. He treated the snowball fights and the erecting of snowmen and the sledding in Central Park as ways to make the best of a bad situation, and he would think of swimming pools and the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, of the summer months that lay ahead.
Even now, sometimes, he wondered whether he should have followed Carter to California; he was made for the weather on the West Coast. But Mia hadn’t wanted to move to California, and for Julian, too, California seemed alien and far away. Besides, Carter acted so superior about California. He would send Julian postcards on the front of which appeared the sunset over Half Moon Bay, or whales at Point Reyes, or the coastal highway winding past Big Sur, and he would sign off, “From the land of volleyball and Golden Retrievers, where the weather comes just as you order it.” The more Carter effused about California, the less appealing the state became to Julian, though days like today, with the wind-chill factor near zero, were enough to make him wonder.
He was down the hill from his and Mia’s apartment, picking up food for a dinner party. Mia’s friend Sigrid had passed her comprehensive exams and a group of them was celebrating.
Sigrid had an air of composure—a good quality, Julian believed, in a budding psychologist, and in human beings in general. It made sense, he thought, that Sigrid had taken her comprehensives first. In a way, her passing her comps was a celebration for the whole class, because it now seemed possible that they would pass, too.
The exams were an unsparing, day-long ordeal, with an oral and a written component. Going before the firing squad, Mia called it; her own execution was just a few months away. She’d been spending every night in the graduate library and, when that closed, moving next door to the undergraduate library before coming home exhausted at one in the morning. She was drawing perilously close to the all-nighter, an experience she thought she had left behind at college.
There was something about movement, Julian believed, that prompted the creative juices to flow, for he found inspiration when he was driving or running or merely taking a stroll through the Arboretum. Cooking had the same effect; maybe one kind of creativity begat the other. Growing up, he’d never been much of a chef, but he’d begun to cook when he got to Ann Arbor. Mia would come home to find him with flour across his face and herbs from the windowsill lined up in glasses, Julian with baking soda in one hand and baking powder in the other, unsure what the difference was. He appeared unable to distinguish between a garlic clove and a garlic bulb, because one time Mia found him peeling clove after clove of garlic—the recipe had called for three cloves but Julian was peeling three bulbs—and he suspected his error only once he saw the recipe was supposed to take an hour and he’d spent an hour just peeling the garlic.
Another time, Mia found him in the kitchen chopping onions, his racquetball goggles clamped over his face. “Cooking as sport?”
“Onion eyes,” he explained. He had tried placing the onions in water, but that hadn’t worked, nor had chewing on bread or chopping the onions next to a flame, which were other methods people had suggested. So he settled on his racquetball goggles. Other implements had already proven versatile, such as his postage scale, which was doing double duty as a food scale, except now his mail had started to smell of cheese.
Sometimes the recipe said “twelve baby carrots or two carrots peeled,” but twelve baby carrots never equaled two carrots peeled, and he’d be lining up the carrots next to one another, trying to guess the right amount. Or “eight ounces of apple.” Was that before you peeled and cored the apples or afterward? He bought a large spice rack, but he didn’t know much about spices, so, without regard for what they were, he moved alphabetically through the supermarket spice section, sweeping jars into his cart like a looter.
Over time, however, his meals had improved, and in the psychology department, at least, he’d gotten a reputation as a good cook. Sigrid and her boyfriend, Ivan, who ordered out for pizza and Indian food more than they cared to admit, had been pleased to learn that Julian would be cooking dinner tonight.
Home now, Mia said, “What do I smell?”
Julian unveiled the food for her: lamb brochettes with North African spices, shiitake mushroom bread pudding, endive salad with warm sherry vinaigrette.
“You’re amazing, you know.”
Julian shrugged. “Any idiot can read a recipe.”
Not this idiot, she thought. If it weren’t for Julian, she, too, would have been ordering takeout every night.
She was in their bedroom changing clothes when he called out, “Can you set the table?”
In her bra and underwear, she laid out the knives and forks. She put a wineglass at each place setting. Julian stood hovering beside a pot of boiling water. Presently, he stuck his head inside the fridge—to look for something, Mia assumed; or perhaps merely to cool off.
She was pulling a black turtleneck over her head, and she spoke to him through the fabric. “How do I look?”
“Headless.”
“And now?”
“Beautiful.”
To go with the turtleneck, she was wearing a white chiffon skirt. It was a billowy getup and it flounced around her. She didn’t generally dress this way; usually she wore pants and simple tops, sweaters sometimes, a lot of straight lines and angles. But this was a special occasion, and she wanted her attire to announce it as such. She had put on lipstick and eye shadow and was wearing earrings. It felt strange to be dressed up in her own home, where she spent much of her time in sweatpants, often in nothing at all.
She stood in front of the mirror pinning up her hair. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m twenty-seven, and I’m going gray.”
“No, you’re not.”
She picked out a strand and showed it to him. “You see?”
“You look the same as you did the day I met you.”
“Well, that’s not true,” she said darkly.
The guests arrived together, Sigrid and Ivan leading the way, followed by Francine and her boyfriend, Saxton, with Will trailing the pack, holding hands with his girlfriend, Paige.
Will held up a bottle wrapped in felt. “It’s Dom Pérignon,” he announced.
A chorus of admiration rose from the group, and Paige said, “Will blew his whole stipend on it.”
Will shrugged. “How often does a girl get to pass her comps?”
Sigrid was at the center of the room, and the rest of the group orbited around her. She had curly auburn hair and was wearing a cashmere cardigan that was auburn, too. The effect was to make her luminous, as if, having passed her exams, she’d been lit up.
“Let me start with a beer,” she said. “It feels like I haven’t had one in months. It’s as if I’ve been pregnant.”
“Don’t say it,” Francine said. “Passing your comps is like giving birth.”
“More like taking a dump, I’m afraid.”
“You’re next,” Will reminded Mia.
They were sitting in clusters, and the way they held themselves, the ease of conversation, reminded Julian of college. It made him nostalgic for a time when everyone was just dropping by, the cheeseburgers and onion rings eaten on dorm room floors, the hastily organized surprise parties, the years when time unfurled illusorily before them, when there was nothing to do but celebrate one another.
With one hand, Julian took everyone’s coats, and with the other he passed out bottles of beer. “Grad student, grad student, grad student,” he said. “Do they produce anything else here?” Sigrid, Francine, and Will were Mia’s classmates, and their partners were graduate students, too, Paige in anthropology, Saxton and Ivan in comparative literature.
“The imagination gets constricted in this town,” Ivan said. “It’s either grad school or go work for GM.”
Saxton dug into the plate of baked Brie, then passed it around to the others.
“So this is how you know you
’re a grad student,” Mia said. “The couch sags so low you can’t get up.”
But soon, with the promise of dinner, they managed to disentangle themselves from the furniture and, starting to get drunk, they deposited themselves around the table, with Sigrid at the head.
“Happy birthday, Sigrid!” someone called out, and buoyant, blithe, and lighthearted, the liquor spreading through them, they joined in a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” though it wasn’t really Sigrid’s birthday.
Julian brought out the salad, and Francine, rising, said, “Can I help?” But Julian declined all offers of assistance. He liked Mia’s classmates, but when the conversation turned to shop, as it often did, when someone referred to something that had happened in class, when a piece of gossip was proffered about one of the professors, he felt, not excluded, exactly, but as if he were hovering on the periphery, looking in through a window at the festivities going on inside. He liked going to parties, but once he and Mia were actually at one it was she who had the better time, for she was more adept at small talk than he was. Friendship—the very idea of it—assailed him. There were people in Ann Arbor he had gotten to know and could, with pleasure, grab a beer with, but there was no one with whom he’d established a true kinship. Most of the people they socialized with were Mia’s fellow graduate students, and though she encouraged him to develop his own relationships with them, when he found himself alone with one of them he realized how much he relied on her to grease the wheels of the friendship.
“Eat,” Sigrid insisted.
So Julian sat down. But then he was up again, bringing out the lamb and the bread pudding and pouring more wine and beer.
Now everyone was talking about the future of clinical psychology.
“What I fear,” Sigrid said, “is that twenty years from now we’ll be looked at no differently from soothsayers and phrenologists.”
“The quick fix,” Will said, bemoaning what they all bemoaned: the growing dominion of psychiatry and medication, the rise of HMOs, behavior modification, short-term therapy.
“Half my students are on Ritalin,” Francine said.
Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 12
