Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  When he arrived, Carter was standing in front of the restaurant, wearing a black silk jacket and a tie.

  “Am I late?” Julian said. “And underdressed?” He had changed into khakis and an Oxford shirt.

  “Late, yes,” said Carter. He didn’t say anything about Julian’s clothes. “I had to pull some strings. This wasn’t an easy reservation to get graduation week.”

  Now, having been seated by the hostess, Julian unfolded his napkin on his lap. “So this is the famous Chez Panisse. Do you eat here often?”

  “I’ve got my own chair here,” Carter said. “Someday they’re going to stuff it and put it in a museum.”

  “And you along with it?”

  “If I’m lucky.”

  Shattuck Avenue was a busy street, but Chez Panisse was set back and felt secluded. Upstairs was the café, where you could get the poor man’s version of the restaurant’s food, though that wasn’t for the poor, either. Carter read through the wine list appraisingly. Between him and Julian, a single candle bobbed in a glass.

  “Isn’t Pilar coming?”

  Carter shook his head. “Pilar’s too busy to eat. These big law firms own you.”

  A woman approached, and Carter rose to hug her. “Alice,” he said, “this is Julian, my buddy from college. He flew out from Michigan to see me graduate. Alice is responsible for my good health,” he told Julian. “I kid you not. She’s made me look at the world in a whole new way.”

  Alone now, Carter said, “Do you realize who that was?”

  “Alice?” said Julian.

  “As in Alice Waters? Chef and owner of Chez Panisse? Spawner of a culinary revolution?” In college, Carter had subsisted on cheeseburgers, onion rings, potato chips, and chimichangas. He’d been contemptuous of anyone who regarded food as more than sustenance, and in this regard, at least, he had become the kind of person he’d once despised. He’d taken a couple of wine-tasting courses, and in his house, in a leather container next to the toilet, sat a pile of old issues of Wine Spectator. He’d befriended the produce buyers at Berkeley Bowl, and every Thursday when he shopped for groceries they would set aside a special basket for him filled with litchis, loquats, Pluots, and Apriums.

  Chez Panisse served a prix fixe menu, and tonight it was grilled asparagus salad followed by pork shoulder, Chino Ranch carrots, and Jerusalem artichoke purée. Growing up, Julian had eaten with his parents in more expensive restaurants than this one, but his father was a meat-and-potatoes man who, though he found himself on occasion at Bouley Bakery or Le Cirque, was still happiest ordering a porterhouse at Peter Luger. Julian’s mother was the same way. “So has this made you happy?” Julian asked Carter.

  “Eating here?”

  “Your new life. It’s what you always wanted. To be rich.”

  “It hasn’t made me unhappy.”

  “But is it what you imagined?”

  “Nothing’s what you imagine,” Carter said. “Anyway, I think happiness is beside the point.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “They’ve done studies that show that when something good occurs people aren’t as happy as they expected to be, and when something bad occurs they aren’t as devastated. We each have a natural disposition we eventually return to. It’s the best argument I’ve heard for the welfare state. Because it’s for the truly poor that money matters. Meet a poor person’s basic needs and you have an impact on his happiness. But once he reaches a threshold, the extra wealth doesn’t make a difference.”

  “So you’ve been tilting at windmills all these years.”

  Carter shook his head. “I’m happy to have money even if it hasn’t transformed me. As Mae West said, ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.’”

  “Yet it hasn’t made you a Republican.”

  “You should know,” Carter said. “You’re rich and you’re a Democrat.”

  “Some people would say it’s because I can afford to be one.”

  “A limousine liberal?”

  Julian shrugged. His father had tried to make him a Republican, but from the start, he’d felt different from his parents. In November 1972, his mother had taken him to the voting booth and let him pull the lever, but she wouldn’t allow him to vote for McGovern and he sulked all the way home. He was four: what did he know? But he sensed intuitively that he wasn’t for Nixon. And four years later, he voted for Jimmy Carter in his school’s mock elections, though his parents loathed Carter and made arch, knowing jokes about peanut farmers. “When I was in junior high school, my father would draw Laffer curves on my breakfast napkin. He was trying to teach me about supply-side economics. My father’s a smart guy and he’s irrepressible, but I wouldn’t budge.”

  “When I was in junior high school,” Carter said, “I didn’t even know what a Laffer curve was.”

  “I knew all I needed to know,” Julian said. “That Arthur Laffer was a Republican flunky. Apparently, he drew his curve on a napkin in a Washington, D.C., bar and trickle-down theory was born.”

  Carter removed a pen and drew a Laffer curve on a piece of scrap paper. The Signet logo was embossed on his pen.

  “Why did you leave Signet, anyway?”

  Carter shrugged. “For me, it’s always been about getting there. But once I’m there, I become restless. With Signet, we made this great software, but then I wanted to know what came next.”

  “So now you go work for a law firm?”

  “It’s what’s expected of me. Otherwise, why did I go back to school?” Carter looked down at his plate, which was empty now, just a small mound of gristle in the corner and a couple of fugitive gravy spots. If he didn’t know better, Julian thought, if he hadn’t become refined, Carter would have asked for seconds. He was a creature of appetite, he’d always been that way, and Julian was as well, the two of them with their hunger and their fast metabolisms. At the all-you-can-eat sushi place in Northington, they used to compete to see who could eat more. “What about you?” Carter said. “Are you still working on your novel?”

  “Every day.”

  “You just get up in the morning and write? I don’t think I’d have the discipline to do that.”

  “What do you mean? You started your own company.”

  “That was different. Other people were counting on me. I had deadlines and an office.” Carter considered this. “I still miss it sometimes. Sitting around with everyone, shooting the shit.” He was eating dessert now, scooping up his tangerine soufflé. A cup of tea sat in front of him, and he dropped a lump of sugar into it. “So how’s your book going?”

  “Glacially,” Julian said. “It’s like that joke about Joyce Carol Oates. Someone calls her up and her secretary says, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Oates can’t come to the phone right now, she’s busy writing a book,’ and the person says, ‘That’s okay, I’ll hold.’ Only with me it’s the opposite. Rip Van Winkle wakes up twenty years later and I’m still writing my novel.”

  “Now, now.”

  “I’ve been at it almost ten years,” he said. “I’ve got two hundred and fifty pages, though I’ve probably thrown out twenty for every one I’ve kept. I’m laying waste to whole forests.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  Julian hesitated. Even to Mia, he hadn’t confided much; he didn’t want to jinx himself. Growing up, he’d had a special cup he drank from and a lucky number, eight. When he watched the Mets at Shea Stadium in 1973, five years old, in the corporate box seats with his father, he always wore his baseball glove, less because he expected to catch a foul ball than because he believed it made the Mets play better. It had worked when he was watching them on TV. Writers, Julian believed, came in all types, but one way or another they were control freaks, and superstition was nothing if not an attempt to exert control. Besides, he thought a good novel resisted summary; it had to speak for itself. Still, he felt he owed Carter an answer, for Carter was his friend and he’d written fiction, too.

  “It’s about me,” he said, “but pretty quick
ly it departs from fact.” At the table across from them, the waiter had brought out another bottle of wine and was holding it up for approval. A pretty blonde in a short skirt and tights wove her way back to her seat, her heels clicking against the floor. “Remember how Professor Chesterfield used to say that everyone at college either writes what they know, which is a transcript of Friday night’s keg party, or what they don’t know, which is Martians? Well, according to him, you should write what you know about what you don’t know or what you don’t know about what you know. Keep it close enough to home that your heart is in it but far enough away that the imagination can take over. That way, you don’t descend into solipsism.”

  “Are you succeeding?”

  “I feel like I am. But then I lose confidence and think I need to shake up my life. You know, ‘The writer has to live!’ It’s ridiculous. According to Flannery O’Connor, anyone who’s lived until the age of ten has enough material to write about for a lifetime.”

  “So what are you worried about?”

  He shrugged. “I keep telling Mia I’m going to quit teaching, but I have no idea what I’d do instead. I wish I had your balls. You decide to leave law school, and the next time I look up you’re running a multimillion-dollar tech company.”

  “It wasn’t quite that simple.”

  “You’re not afraid to try something new.” An image came to Julian of Carter feasting on something nauseous in a faraway land (bugs? grasshoppers? Carter had sent photos) and of Julian’s last trip to San Francisco, when Carter had taken him to a restaurant and attempted, unsuccessfully, to get him to eat brains. Try everything at least once, Carter liked to say. A few years ago, scientists had discovered a novelty-seeking gene, and when Julian told Carter about it, Carter said, “That’s me.”

  “Things are getting even more complicated,” Julian said now. “Mia wants a baby.”

  “And you don’t want one?”

  “In theory I’m persuadable.”

  “But in reality?”

  “I promised myself I’d finish my novel first.”

  “People with babies write novels.”

  “You sound just like Mia.”

  The restaurant was starting to empty out, and Alice Waters stood next to the kitchen, her hair tied up in a bandanna.

  “What about you?” Julian said. “Do you and Pilar think about kids?”

  Carter shook his head. “The Heinz dynasty stops with me. I have enough trouble taking care of myself.”

  “And Pilar’s okay with that?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  Alice approached them. “Are you two sleeping over?”

  Carter shrugged apologetically. “Julian and I were just catching up.”

  “I can give you a lift home.”

  “Okay,” he said, “we can take a hint.”

  Then they were out into the night, Carter going north toward the Berkeley hills, Julian south to the hotel, walking slowly through the crowds on Shattuck, taking himself toward repose.

  “Hey, you! Wainwright!”

  It was Carter, shouting at him from his convertible. “You told me the Cheeseboard,” Julian said.

  “I also told you nine, and it’s nine-fifteen. Which makes it afternoon your time. You’re not in college any longer.” Carter held a paper bag out the window, letting it dangle like bait. “Come on,” he said. “Get in.”

  They headed west on University Avenue, the sun slowly ascending above the bay. On the corner of Sacramento, someone had opened a fire hydrant, and a group of teenagers was spraying passing cars. “It’s supposed to hit eighty today,” Carter said. “And eighty-five tomorrow. I’ll be sweating in my cap and gown.” A blind man stopped at the crosswalk, rhythmically tapping his cane. “Listen, can you fend for yourself for a couple of hours? I’ll drive you into the city and you can wander around for a while. I need to take care of a few things.”

  Now, as they approached San Francisco, Carter silently ate his cheese roll. It seemed to Julian that he was turning in on himself, that he was less expansive than he’d been last night.

  “Is everything okay?” he said. “You seem subdued.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  They parked in the Haight and walked along Carl Street and up into Cole Valley, then down the hill into the Castro. On Castro Street, all the cars were parked with their wheels turned to the curb and everyone drove with their emergency brakes. “It’s the world’s hilliest city,” Carter said. “People drive even if they’re going only a few blocks.”

  “But not you, Heinz.”

  “I’m like everyone else. I take the elevator to the third floor so I can work out on the StairMaster.”

  “And now we’ve left the car on the other side of the city.”

  “If we walk quickly, we can get back in half an hour.”

  “I thought you needed to take care of some things.”

  “I tell you what,” Carter said. “You can come with me.”

  They walked back to the car, then drove silently along Clement Street, past the produce stands and the Chinese restaurants. They turned right on Park Presidio, and soon the wind was at their backs and they could see the Golden Gate Bridge. “I hate tolls,” Carter said. “Three bucks just to commit suicide. People come from all over the world to jump from here.” He looked out the window. “They’ve talked about putting up barriers to make it more difficult, but if someone’s determined it would be hard to stop them.”

  They got off the bridge, then wound their way through the hills. On the car in front of them was a BILL BRADLEY FOR PRESIDENT bumper sticker. The tree branches canopied them, covering them in shadows. Carter made a left, a right, another right, and a left again. He slowed down and turned into a driveway. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said, and it wasn’t until he was walking up the path to a modest A-frame house that Julian realized where they were. Sausalito. Carter’s parents’ house.

  “Should I come in?”

  “No need to,” Carter said. “I won’t be long.”

  But twenty minutes later Carter still hadn’t returned. A bird called out; a couple of cars drove past. Julian heard voices through the open window, he saw a figure shimmering behind drapes, but then there was nothing. He had met Carter’s parents just once, at Graymont’s graduation, though he expected he would see them again tomorrow. At college, the only one who knew Carter’s parents was Pilar. It was as if Carter kept them sealed away, bringing them out on special occasions only to return them to the closet.

  Julian flipped on the radio, but all he could get was static. He leaned his head against the window and shut his eyes.

  He was woken by the sound of Carter kicking up gravel, his friend, loaded down, walking along the path.

  “Wainwright, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it would take this long.” Carter was holding books and papers, and a pillow, and a carrying bag.

  “Here, let me help you.”

  “I’m all right.” Carter deposited his belongings in the trunk.

  In the car now, he let the engine idle. He looked up obscurely at his parents’ house. “There it is,” he said. “The place I grew up.”

  “Yet you’re not giving tours.”

  Carter tapped his feet against the brake. “You should know something,” he said. “Pilar won’t be coming to graduation tomorrow.”

  “Don’t tell me she can’t get off for something as important as this.”

  “The truth is, I’ve asked her not to come.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Carter laid his head against the steering wheel. “We’re not together,” he said. “We’ve separated.”

  “Carter, you’re kidding me.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A couple of months ago.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I was going to tell you last night. I tried to tell you. I’ve been staying with a friend until I find my own place.”

  “Are you getti
ng a divorce?”

  “We haven’t started the proceedings, but it looks like it.”

  “Jesus, Carter, I’m so sorry.”

  Carter tapped his hand against the steering wheel. “You want me to tell you about it?”

  “If you’re willing.”

  Carter started the car and they drove in silence, up through Tiburon, Corte Madera, and San Rafael. All the cars were exceeding the speed limit, but Carter was driving faster than them all.

  He pulled over to the side of the road. “I could give you all the usual reasons.”

  “What are those?”

  “I spent too much time at work, and Pilar did, too. We started to take each other for granted. We didn’t attend to our sex life.” He looked down at his lap. “I mean, Jesus, everyone gets divorced. Why did we think we’d be immune?”

  “It just never occurred to me.”

  “I thought we were too young to get divorced, but then I thought we were too young to get married and we did that. And sure, I’m only thirty-one and twenty years from now I’ll probably think I was just a kid saying this, but I can see myself feeling the same way at fifty or sixty. Real life, the big decisions—those always seemed to be the realm of someone else, and I thought when my turn came I’d know it.” Carter looked up at Julian. “You want to know the truth? I think Pilar and I shouldn’t have been together in the first place.”

  “Oh, come on. You can’t convince me of that. Mia and I—we were with you guys for four years.” Julian recalled those early months together, the four of them playing cards in the dorms, and how, when Carter won, he would do hurdles over the couch where Julian and Mia were sitting, and Pilar, watching him, seemed in her heart to be hurdling, too. “If Carter has his way,” Pilar said once, “I’ll end up wherever he takes me.” And this, Julian thought, was where he’d taken her. California. Separation. He couldn’t believe it. If he’d been asked freshman year which couple would stay together, he would have bet on Carter and Pilar.

  “I’m not saying I didn’t love her,” Carter said, “or that she didn’t love me. I’m saying we weren’t the right fit.” Meeting Pilar, he explained, hadn’t been that different from meeting Julian. He loved them both, and all right, he admitted it, they made him feel bad about himself. He wanted to be Pilar and it seemed she wanted him to be her, too; she made him into her project. “I was the rebel,” he said, “and she was going to civilize me. The boyfriend on the motorcycle. Épatons les bourgeoisie. At dinner last night you asked how I feel about having all this money, but I could have ten times the money and it wouldn’t change where I come from. Give me a little credit, Wainwright. The expensive clothes, the dinners at Chez Panisse, the friendship with Alice Waters? You think I don’t know I’m compensating?”