It was eight-thirty in the morning when he arrived in Ann Arbor. A town of students, where the streets were abuzz long past midnight, but at this hour everyone was asleep. It was February, and the roads were snow-covered. He trod tentatively, feeling like an interloper, when, he realized, he’d been gone only six months, and except for his friends, no one would have found his presence remarkable.
At Shaman Drum, he scanned the New Fiction shelves, then picked up a Michigan Daily from outside the store. He headed down State Street, toward Hill and Packard, silently reciting the street names, as if to make sure he hadn’t forgotten them. He cut back up Monroe, past the law school and across the diag, passing Angell Hall where, no doubt, his old office was occupied by someone new.
It was eleven o’clock when he reached Mia’s apartment. She had moved out of their place on Kingsley Street and was living on the Old West Side. He’d looked her up this morning when he got to town and saw that she was listed on Fountain Street. He himself was still listed on Granger, where he’d last lived, and also, inexplicably, at their address on Kingsley. In Ann Arbor, it seemed, there was no erasing you. And in other places, too, for back in New York he was still served jury notices every couple of years, and no matter what he did he was unable to convince the city that he wasn’t a resident any longer and hadn’t been one since he’d left for college. Year after year the courts kept calling, until eventually he stopped answering the letters. He half expected to find a policeman at his door one day, ready to extradite him to New York.
He rang the bell but no one answered, and he was reaching into his bag to write a note when he heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Julian?” Mia said. “What are you doing here?” She was standing outside now, and she took a step back, as if to regard him afresh. “You look terrible.”
He laughed.
“No, I mean…”
“I’ve been driving all night,” he explained. “I was home in New York. I’m on my way back to Iowa.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I am.”
“Do you want to take a nap?”
He hesitated.
“You’re thinking why would I trust you alone in my apartment? The world’s biggest snoop? The truth is, I don’t have a lot of secrets. And the ones I have, I can part with.” She held out her keys.
“I have another idea. Do you want to grab lunch?”
She laughed. “So, I get it. You need to leave town in order to have lunch with me? If I’d known, I’d have sent you away ages ago.”
They found a table at Red Hot Lovers, home to the world’s largest condiment selection. Julian piled relish on top of onions on top of barbecue sauce on top of pickles. He smiled at Mia. “You look good,” he said.
“You’re just not used to seeing me in a skirt.”
“Or in makeup.”
“It’s my nod to the work world. It’s how I remind myself I’m an adult.” She looked up at him. “How are you, Julian? How’s Iowa?”
“Savage.”
“Is your writing not going well?”
“My novel is stalled. On the other hand, I’ve been writing stories.”
“And you’re happy with those?”
He reached into his bag and removed a copy of Harper’s. It was the issue with his story in it; his name was printed on the front cover.
“Oh, Julian!”
Now, emboldened, he told Mia that Harper’s had accepted another story of his. Yet even as he said this, he felt a queasiness overtake him, as if he’d spent some capital without realizing he was doing so.
“It sounds like you’re the star of the program.”
“The program is filled with stars.” He touched his face, where there was several days’ growth of beard. Often he went a week without shaving, though for a time he’d had a full-fledged beard. His accidental beard, he called it; all his beards had begun that way. He might still have had that beard, but Mia hadn’t liked it, so he’d consented to shave it off. “What about you? Are you here for the long haul? Putting down roots?”
“You mean do I finally vote here?” Mia was a dual citizen, and when she and Julian moved to Michigan she refused to switch her registration because she insisted she was in Ann Arbor only on a layover. Now that layover had lasted almost ten years. Finally, she’d relented: she was officially a Michigander. “And do you know what happened? As soon as I established residency, I reached a breakthrough in my dissertation. I was going to be on the fifteen-year plan.”
“But you’re not any longer?”
“I’ll be defending next month.”
“Mia! Congratulations!”
“I’m even thinking of marching at commencement. It’s in the football stadium. Do you remember when we went to football games together?”
He smiled at her: did she think he had forgotten?
When they finished eating, they walked on Washtenaw, then up past the tennis courts to the Arboretum. Mia had taken up running when they moved to town, and sometimes Julian would run with her in the Arb. He was a good athlete, but he was partial to sports that involved balls, and eventually he tired of running, so he walked while she ran. “I’m power walking,” he would say, which sounded to him like an oxymoron, at least as he had come to understand power walking, which involved swiveling your hips and swinging your arms and generally making an ass of yourself. So he walked as unpowerfully as he could, and then he sprinted to catch up with Mia, and soon they started the process all over again.
Now they cut past hedges and bramble. Julian plucked a leaf and smelled it, the way at the produce stands in New York’s Chinatown he liked to raise the unfamiliar vegetables to his nose. His jeans were fraying at the cuffs, which was where they always went first. It happened that way with Mia, too, though, unlike her, he would continue to wear his jeans until there were holes everywhere, until there was practically nothing covering him.
A squirrel halted in their path, moving from side to side, as if hoping to get them to dance.
“We’re explorers,” he told Mia. “Think of me as Ferdinand Magellan.”
“And who am I?”
“Mrs. Magellan,” he said. “Francine.”
“Was that really her name?”
“Franny for short. Ferdinand and Franny Magellan.”
When they used to walk together, they would occasionally wander off onto private property. It always concerned Mia, traversing ground they weren’t supposed to be on, but Julian told her not to worry. It wasn’t as if someone would shoot them.
“You never know,” she’d said.
One time, Julian took out a squirt gun and sprayed her. “A trespasser has to defend himself.”
“Be careful,” she said. “Somebody will think it’s an actual gun and they’re liable to shoot you for real.”
Now, back on campus, she told him she had to go to the library. “I need to check my footnotes. It would be a shame not to graduate because I mispaginated the thing.”
He stood opposite her.
“So is this it?” she said.
“What?”
“I assume you have to leave.”
“I had to leave days ago. I already missed my turn in workshop.”
“Why aren’t you back in Iowa, anyway?”
“It’s a complicated story,” he said.
“Will you at least take a nap before you leave?”
He must have really been tired, because when he awoke it was seven o’clock and dark outside. He recalled childhood naps like this one, lying beneath a mohair throw, waking up unsure of where he was. Mia lived in a studio, and across from him sat her futon—though he realized now it was their futon, the one they’d slept on in college. He’d gone right to sleep in her apartment. He’d been too tired to snoop, though he also felt it wasn’t his right to do so. He didn’t, in the end, want to know her secrets. It felt like enough of a secret that he was here.
“Are you feeling better?” Mia stood across from him, holding open a Zingerman�
�s shopping bag. “I got you some sandwiches,” she said. “And a cherry scone and a peanut butter cookie and a Key lime bar and some fresh-squeezed lemonade and a loaf of Parmesan-pepper bread.”
“You got me bread?”
She held up the loaf of bread. “Wasn’t Parmesan-pepper your favorite?”
He used to memorize the weekly bread schedule and show up at Zingerman’s when the Parmesan-pepper arrived. Then he would go home and make a sandwich for Mia and bring it to her office.
“I figured you’d have the leftovers when you got back to Iowa. Ply your classmates with them.”
They ate dinner together at her little dining room table facing the boxes of herbs on the windowsill: rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, chives. Out of necessity, she had begun to cook, and she thought of Julian as her inspiration, recalling how he’d started to cook when they got to Ann Arbor and had become quite good at it. And he was the one who had purchased the window boxes, who tended to the herbs back in their apartment on Kingsley, who, when she came home, could be seen with them lined up on the kitchen counter, happily conducting his experiments.
“So this is your home,” he said.
“It’s not exactly palatial.”
“No, but it has character. Everywhere you’ve lived has.”
She smiled at him.
“Why? Don’t you like it here?”
“I wouldn’t have minded a larger space, but the price is right.” She hesitated.
“What?”
“I was thinking about how when we moved to Ann Arbor you wanted us to live in a real house.”
“What’s wrong with a real house?”
“Nothing, but I was worried about money. And then you left me, Julian, and even our apartment on Kingsley was too expensive for me.”
“Is that why you thought money was tight? Because in the back of your mind you believed things might not work out?”
“No,” she said. Though it was true, she thought, that she’d never felt his money was hers. When they got married, he had wanted them to join checking accounts, but she refused at first. It took years for her to acclimate to having married someone rich, and those initial months in Ann Arbor she kept a secret log of everything she spent, trying, vainly, to live off her student stipend. “Anyway, I’ll be moving in July.”
“Where to?”
“New York.”
He laughed.
“What?”
“I thought you hated New York.”
The truth was she liked New York, but it had been hard to muster much enthusiasm for it when Julian was being so enthusiastic himself. Now she was the one moving there, while he, to her surprise, hadn’t returned. Was that, she wondered, the reason she’d chosen it? Because, no matter what happened, he might end up back there? No, she thought, she wouldn’t acknowledge it. She’d stopped waiting for him long ago.
She would be working at a clinic at NYU, she said, seeing patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Bosnian refugees, displaced Somalis, a few regular old traumatized Americans. She would do that for a couple of years; then she hoped to open a private practice. “It won’t be easy,” she said. “There are more therapists in Manhattan than in Vienna. But my adviser knows people in New York, so I should get some referrals. The University of Michigan casts a wide net.”
“Go Blue!” he said.
She smiled.
“Is Olivia still living there?”
She nodded. “That’s another reason I’m moving. I want to spend time with her.”
“Has she been dancing?”
“As much as she can.” Olivia had been an understudy with Mark Morris, and when someone from the troupe went down with an injury, she’d gotten to perform at BAM. Their father came in for the performance, and Mia flew in, too. But Olivia had been injured herself. In the last year alone, she’d separated her shoulder and blown out her knee.
“She’s five foot eight,” Mia said, “which is too big for a dancer. Too big for a dancer, she likes to say, and too small for a model. And not pretty enough for either.”
“She’s pretty,” Julian said.
“Of course she is, but she doesn’t see it. And now she’s going out with a married man. Kincaid’s fifteen years older than her, and he has a wife and three daughters. Does she really want to be involved with someone like that, out of all the guys in New York?”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“Of course I have, but she won’t take my advice.” Mia was in the kitchen now, and on the wall across from her hung a backward clock. The one read eleven and the eleven read one; left and right were reversed. It had been a gift from Olivia for her twenty-first birthday, and she’d kept it all this time, transporting it from apartment to apartment. “When you left me, Julian, Olivia started to call regularly for the first time in years. But in the end, she saw my splitting up with you as another example of my good fortune. Do you know why? Because at least we didn’t have kids. From the minute she was born, she’s thought of me as the lucky one, and whatever happens, she simply incorporates it into what she already believes.”
“She sounds like a philosopher,” Julian said. “Never let a fact get in the way of a theory.”
“So I’ve decided to stay quiet. I just watch her carry on her affair and fritter away her inheritance.”
“Is that what she’s doing? Frittering it away?”
“Spending it, yes.” Though Mia supposed “frittering it away” was uncharitable. Olivia gave dance lessons, and occasionally she still picked up waitressing shifts. But that wasn’t enough to support yourself in New York, and realistically, she wasn’t going to be dancing that much longer.
“And you?” Julian said. “Are you still sitting on your inheritance like it doesn’t exist?”
“It’s two hundred thousand dollars,” Mia said. “It’s not going to support me for a lifetime.”
“Right now, it sounds like it’s not supporting you at all.”
“You’re right. And here I am complaining my apartment is too small when I could have done something about it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“And you went along with me, Julian. Paying more of the bills when we split up, letting me convince us I was poor. I don’t want to spend the money for no good reason, but it’s as if there couldn’t be a good enough reason in the world.” She sat down on the couch. “This is crazy. We haven’t spoken in I don’t know how long, and all I can talk about is me, me, me. How are you, Julian? How’s your family?”
He hesitated.
“Is something wrong?”
“My parents have separated,” he said. “They’re getting divorced.”
“Oh, Julian.”
As a boy, Julian used to play Twister with his father. How anomalous it had been to see his father contorted like that, Saturday afternoons, the few hours when he wasn’t at work, and Julian knew he would have his father nearby as long as they were playing Twister together. Because his father wasn’t going to let him win. But as bullheaded as his father was, Julian was more so, and with each spin, his mother, the designated spinner, intoning her instructions, he knew he wouldn’t permit himself to fall and eventually, if he was steadfast, his father would capitulate. And when he did, when he tumbled to the mat, perspiring, his tie sweeping across the floor, he looked up at Julian still crouched on the mat and said, “I admire your stubbornness, son.”
And this was what his stubbornness had wrought. He’d gone off to Iowa City, a town with no draw for him, no history save for the history of the Writers’ Workshop, to classmates who saw themselves as his competitors and who left him no choice but to see them as competitors, too. He’d lost everything, everyone important to him. He’d lost Mia and he’d lost Carter, and now his parents were getting divorced and he’d lost them, too.
“Can I ask why they separated?”
“It wasn’t a happy marriage,” he said. “I figure they should have split up twenty-five years ago.” He wiped his face with a tissue
, then forced out a laugh. Sugar tears: he was crying the remains of his Key lime bar. “When your mother was dying, Mia, I wished it was happening to my mother instead. Because, I thought, if it was my mother, sure, I’d be upset, but I didn’t think it would be so terrible. I was twenty-one. I thought I was done with her, and with my father, too.”
How little they’d known then, she thought. And not much more now. The way your parents could surprise you.
“You liked my parents,” he said, “didn’t you?”
It took her a while, she admitted, but her affection had grown for them. Julian’s mother, especially, had been a solace to her after her own mother died. Occasionally, the two of them would talk on the phone even when Julian wasn’t there. And then Julian left and she lost his parents, too. She recalled a spring afternoon, a few hours spent shopping with Julian’s mother, strolling along Madison Avenue. Her memories of shopping, the good ones, at least, always involved her mother. Men didn’t understand this, the intimacy you felt when shopping with your mother; she didn’t fully understand it herself. But she marked that as a time when things opened up between her and Julian’s mother, when she felt more welcomed by his family, and she felt more welcoming herself.
She looked up at the clock. “It’s almost ten,” she said. “I don’t want you driving through the night.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You can sleep on my couch. You’ve already staked a claim to it.”
She flipped on the TV, and they sat in front of it watching but not really, letting the sounds sweep over them.
“Did your parents really keep the TV in the closet?”
She nodded. The status quo ante, she thought. She could hear her father’s voice, see him fiddling with the antenna he’d made from that clothes hanger.
“I thought of calling you on your birthday,” he said. He’d been born at four-fifteen in the morning, and every year on his birthday his parents used to wake him up in the middle of the night so they could sing “Happy Birthday” at the moment he was born. He’d worked at Bennigan’s one summer on Cape Cod, and when it was a customer’s birthday he would bring out a piece of cake with a single candle on it and the waiters would sing the Bennigan’s song. “Happy, happy birthday, may all your dreams come true. Happy, happy birthday from Bennigan’s to you.” It was the same song he’d sung to Mia every year on her birthday.
Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 22
