Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  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.”

  It occurred to him, as if for the first time, that he was going to see his father again.

  “I had this idea when you were small that I’d run off to Paris and start a new life. What a borrowed fantasy that was, some schoolgirl’s idea of romance.”

  “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “What would I have done with you? I wasn’t about to leave you and move across the world.”

  “I would have come along.” And for an instant Julian allowed himself to imagine it, too, life on the lam with his mother, living in Paris in some garret, getting by, the two of them.

  “You wouldn’t have stood for it. Besides, you were always making fun of my love of the French. You thought I was putting on airs.”

  “You weren’t?”

  She shook her head. “Paris was where Dad and I first traveled.”

  “On your honeymoon?”

  She nodded. “We went out dancing, and we spent afternoons people-watching at Café les Deux Magots. But it wasn’t just the honeymoon, because every time we went back to Paris this more sprightly person emerged. A version of him appears whenever we travel. When Dad left, I wanted to say, ‘Give me a call when you retire.’ I have this idea that we could be happy if work weren’t hanging over him, but work will always be hanging over him, and if he ever retires, which he won’t, it will still be hanging over him, the fact that he isn’t doing it any longer.” She thought for a moment. “I like to enjoy myself and it’s hard for Dad to do that. That’s been the fundamental difference between us.”

  “And will you be able to enjoy yourself now?”

  She cast him a saturnine look; those dark green eyes could bore a hole in him, could still, when she was fifty-nine, catch the attention of a man across the room. When she was six months old, Julian’s grandmother was told how lovely her daughter was; maybe she should be in advertisements. Those long days at the playground, the diaper changes and tantrums, praying for the naps to last longer, the dull hours waiting for her husband to come home so she could make dinner for him. On a lark, she sent in a photo, and Julian’s mother was chosen for a laundry detergent billboard. Constance Wainwright, née Prescott, the Downy baby. There was talk of entering her in beauty pageants, but Julian’s grandfather wouldn’t countenance it; he thought beauty pageants were déclassé. Yet that was the image that came to Julian now, his melancholy mother in her beauty queen crown, coasting along on a parade float.

  “For years I felt such responsibility for him.”

  “Shouldn’t he have felt responsibility for you?” An image came to Julian from years ago, his mother lying on the couch late at night, her stockings bunched at her feet so her skin looked like an elephant’s, one boot off and one boot on, his melancholy mother waiting for his father, listening for the sound of a key.

  “You don’t think he kept up his end of the deal?”

  “Do you?”

  “He wasn’t abusive, certainly.”

  Julian laughed.

  “You’re saying that’s a pretty low standard?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I suppose. But he never raised his voice to me, and he was always concerned for my comfort. The only thing I hold him responsible for is how he was with you.”

  “I turned out all right.” And he thought this was true. Though he also felt as if he were going to cry.

  “I want you to know Dad always loved you, even if he wasn’t able to show it.”

  “Look at you,” he said. “Still defending him.”

  “I’m loyal to a fault,” she admitted. “And Dad is someone who inspires loyalty. He’s quite vulnerable, don’t you think?”

  “If he is, I’ve never seen it.”

  “That’s because if he showed it, he’d fall apart.”

  “Why?”

  “It has to do with his brother, I’m sure.”

  “The phantom Lowell?”

  “He wasn’t a phantom.”

  But Julian had always thought of him that way. The dead brother. Run over in the driveway when the ball rolled onto the street. His father standing there, watching it all. If only things had been different. But things hadn’t been different, and to envision his father as someone else was, at a certain point, fatuous. “He left you, Mom. Isn’t it time you got angry at him?”

  “I am angry at him. But what you don’t understand is I’ve been angry at him for years now, and I’m tired of it.” She was standing next to the living room window, where a set of French doors opened onto the balcony. Julian recalled being a toddler, when she used to hold him on that balcony after his father left for work and they watched the planes descend to LaGuardia. And when his mother fed him, she would imitate a plane, saying, “Zoom, zoom, zoom, into the landing field,” moving the spoon like a propeller into his mouth.

  “I passed Dalton the other day,” she said. “It was three-thirty in the afternoon and all the students were leaving. I had a moment when I expected you to walk out the door.”

  Dalton. He’d gone there from kindergarten through twelfth grade. He’d always liked school, yet what he recalled most distinctly about Dalton was waiting for classes to let out. College had been easy by comparison. In high school, he’d woken up at six-thirty in the morning, whereas in college he often didn’t rise until noon. He complained about Ann Arbor and Iowa City, but when he and Mia had driven cross-country he insisted they stop in every college town they passed. Mia used to say he was a walking college tour. One time, he told his mother, they drove through North Carolina and stopped in Raleigh and Durham and Chapel Hill until finally Mia said, “Enough!”

  “Was she bored?”

  “It was more than that. She associates college with her mother getting sick. Besides, she’s never liked college towns. They’re too one-industry for her.”

  “Yet she took you to Ann Arbor.”

  “She’s a contradiction, isn’t she?”

  “I guess it’s hard to go to graduate school in a place where there’s no school.”

  He followed his mother into the living room, to the couches and chairs on which he’d reclined as a child tossing a tennis ball to himself. He’d always had a ball in his hand, sometimes a real ball, sometimes a makeshift one he’d fashioned out of newspaper. He would spend hours firing it into the wastepaper basket, always to the accompaniment of some sportscaster’s voice regaling the audience with his feats. Back then, he couldn’t walk anywhere without tapping a doorpost; everything was an improvised gymnasium.

  He had fixed himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Standing across from his mother, he held the sandwich out.

  She smiled at him.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were giving me your sandwich crust.”

  “Is that what I used to do?”

  “You don’t remember? Once I forgot to remove the crust, and you brought it home and handed it to me.”

  “As a souvenir?”

  “More like a rebuke. I’m always saying a mother never loses her peach pit instinct. Even with a grown son, you have to stop yourself from sticking out your hand when your child finishes a piece of fruit.”

  “Was I difficult?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, laughing. “You were bewitching and sweet. Easy words for a mother to say, but in your case they’re true. I’m afraid I was the difficult one.”

  “Oh, Mom.” He remembered being small, that love affair between mother and son. She used to take him to the boys’ department at Bloomingdale’s after school and buy him sweaters,
neckties, and little-boy dickeys, sending him shuttling back and forth to the fitting room. And afterward, seeing him in his new clothes, she would lavish kisses on him, saying, “I could just eat you up.”

  “It’s hard being an only child. If Dad and I had had more children, it would have spread the burden out.”

  “But you chose not to have them.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got pregnant, I miscarried.”

  “I thought you didn’t want another baby.”

  She laughed. Her pregnancy with him had been easy, she said, but after that she kept miscarrying. “It happened six times. Finally Dad convinced me it was overwhelming us.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He’d believed his bunkbed, which still stood in his old bedroom twenty-five years later, was a consolation prize, when his parents, as much as he, he realized now, had longed for someone else to fill it.

  “It was years ago,” she said. “And we had you. Quality is more important than quantity.”

  Memories alighted on him. Playing gin rummy with his mother before he went to sleep. A daffodil petal falling gently to the floor. Sitting in the lobby when it was snowing out, reaching into the doorman’s coat pocket for sucking candies while outside his parents were warming up the car for him, his father in a fur hat and gloves, brushing snow off the windshield, his mother with her own scraper, brushing snow, too, his parents next to each other like windshield wipers themselves, their arms moving up and down.

  He arrived at his father’s office, an expanse larger than many Manhattan apartments, and all glass, with views that made him feel as though he were descending in an airplane. My kingdom, Richard Wainwright called it self-deprecatingly, but there was nothing self-deprecating about the office. In the framed letters and photos on the walls, Julian’s father was standing next to a sequence of New York City mayors, Lindsay, Beame, Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani, as if they were lining up to greet him. His father’s office was gigantic, the way Julian had once thought of his father himself, Julian’s head level with his father’s waist, the days of standing in the bathroom watching his father shave as if trying to uncover some secret. He was the bearer of his mother’s genetic heritage, tall, wispy, delicate-framed, and despairing of this, he had, at fourteen, started to lift weights. Then, at sixteen, he realized with a start that he was taller than his father, though he still didn’t have his father’s stumpy neck. “Are we going out to eat?”

  “I thought we’d stay in.”

  A blond woman brought in sandwiches, and sushi, and plates of roasted vegetables, and fruits and nuts, and a silver bowl with Beluga caviar. It was enough to feed the floor, but it was just the two of them, him and his father. He knew he would eat a sandwich and his father would, too, and he’d have a little sushi and then, like a bear, he’d forage among the nuts and berries. But most of the food would go uneaten, and Julian, recalling the starving in this country and around the world, the homeless man he’d given a dollar to this morning, thought, What a waste. There they were again, the indignation and sanctimony. The lectures he’d given his father about water preservation, the silent breakfasts when he was in high school, his father clipping out articles from The Wall Street Journal while he clipped out articles from The Nation and The Progressive, the two of them communicating like this for years, unable, it seemed, to talk to each other.

  “I appreciate your coming home,” his father said. “I know Mom does, too.”

  Julian nodded.

  “You flew in?”

  “I drove. All the flights were booked.”

  His father had wanted to see him, and in a way Julian had wanted to see him, too, but now that he was here, he didn’t know what he’d been hoping for.

  His father got up and stood by the window, and Julian, not sure what else to do, joined him. And he realized, standing there, how accustomed he’d grown to seeing New York City from up high, from his parents’ apartment, from his father’s office on the thirty-eighth floor, so that now, when he thought of New York, it was as if he were always flying over it.

  Below them, the pedestrians moved along Fifth Avenue, spattering the sidewalk like paint.

  “It makes you feel tiny,” his father said.

  But Julian felt as if he were nothing at all.

  “You look good,” his father said, touching Julian’s jacket sleeve. When he was a boy, Julian always wore a suit to his father’s office because his father thought he should look like a man in this world of men. Julian’s grandfather had made Julian’s father do the same thing, and so they’d carried on this sartorial tradition from one generation to the next. Now, when Julian didn’t own a single suit, when all he had was a tattered blazer, he had worn a jacket to his father’s office, having found one in his bedroom closet last night. Once, when he visited his father at work, he arrived to see streamers tacked to the walls, and a sign that read, WELCOME, JULIAN, and when his father introduced him to his colleagues, someone said, “Don’t look now, but here comes the new head of arbitrage.” His father took him for lunch to the rooftop garden and gave him one of his business cards, and for a time Julian wanted nothing more than to have a business card of his own. His father had hoped that he’d go into investment banking, and for a second now Julian wished just that, that he’d gone to Yale and studied economics, that he’d been able to be his father’s son.

  His father wore a tormented expression; it frightened Julian, for he’d never seen that look before. He saw that his father, the most solitary man in the world, was also terrified to be alone. His mother was wrong; his father wouldn’t have left her if there hadn’t been someone else. “You have a girlfriend, Dad, don’t you?”

  His father hesitated.

  “Fuck,” Julian said.

  His father began to speak, then stopped.

  “So it’s true?”

  “It’s not why I left Mom, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You two were together for almost forty years. Don’t you think you owe her something?”

  “I owe her a lot,” his father said. “But am I obliged to stay with her when neither of us is happy?” He pulled on his jacket sleeves. For his birthday once, Julian had bought him a pair of blue jeans, but they looked too much like a costume, and he never wore them again. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “She’s not half my age, and she’s not a bimbo.”

  No, Julian thought, he couldn’t imagine his father with a bimbo, though the truth was he couldn’t imagine him with anyone at all, not even with his mother, though he also couldn’t imagine him without her. It occurred to him for the first time how implausible it was for his mother to have fallen for him in the first place.

  His father removed a card from his desk drawer. It was thin and white, like a credit card with nothing printed on it. “I was in Laos last month.”

  Then Julian understood. Years ago, when his father traveled on business, he would bring home the key from the hotel room he’d stayed in; the corporate mogul was filching hotel keys for his son. Julian had keys from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan, from Peru, Botswana, New Zealand, and Zimbabwe. He kept the keys in his desk, and when his father was away he’d take them out, trying to imagine where he was.

  “I want you to have it,” his father said.

  A hotel key card. Because even in Laos, in Luang Prabang, in sleepy cities just starting to embrace industry, hotels didn’t use real keys any longer; they used plastic key cards, and you didn’t even have to steal them, they were disposable. “Tell me about Lowell, Dad.”

  “Who?”

  “My uncle,” he said, and how curious that word felt emerging from his mouth, for he’d never really had an uncle, not one related by blood, at least.

  Seeing his father’s eyes mist over, he said, “It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You probably don’t remember much.”r />
  “I was only four when he died.”

  “Did he look like me?” And it wasn’t until he said those words that he remembered his mother having told him this. The thought came to him, hauntingly, that he was his dead uncle reincarnated.

  “At least in the pictures I’ve seen of him.”

  His father’s lip quavered, and Julian thought, Please, Dad, don’t cry. He’d never seen his father cry, and he wasn’t sure he could endure it now, sitting across from him in his office. He got up to go.

  “Wait, son.”

  Julian stood opposite him as if commanded to.

  “What I remember came afterward. My parents turned the house into a shrine to Lowell. When people asked how many children they had, they said two, and it was years later. Where was my brother? He was more alive to them dead than he’d been when he was alive, certainly more alive to them than I was.”

  It had been his father’s ball Lowell had chased, an errant throw or kick, a four-year-old’s exuberance, and Lowell had gone after it, rushing toward the oncoming car. Julian didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. When he was a boy, his father had refused to play sports with him; he said he wasn’t athletic. Yet there were glints of memory, a teenager hitting a tennis ball against a church, his father catching it as he walked by. His father chasing the bus when he was late to work, running from Sixty-third Street to Sixty-second Street and overtaking it, the fleet-footed sight of him moving like an antelope. Was his father an athlete, after all?

  Julian stood up to shake his father’s hand, and his father reached out and they were hugging. But they got tangled in the arms, so they started over, and this time they were gripping each other. It was as if they were inventing a new mode of affection, waving their arms up and down, two elephants in a tussle, and it wasn’t until they had separated, not until Julian was out of his father’s office and into the elevator, dropping precipitously from the thirty-eighth floor, that he started to cry.