Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He didn’t know. Pride, he imagined. Or fear. The conviction that he’d end up in her apartment, which was where he’d ended up anyway.

  That night, he slept on the couch still wearing his clothes, and Mia was on the futon, in her clothes, too. He’d fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing, and he didn’t even notice that they’d left the TV on.

  When he awoke the next morning, she was at his side, holding orange juice and toast with marmalade.

  “Are you just going to keep feeding me?”

  “Isn’t that what a hostess is supposed to do?”

  He leaned over and kissed her. He was still lying on the couch and she was sitting next to him, and now, when they separated, the toast was stuck to her elbow and marmalade was smeared across his brow.

  She stood up, and he did, too, and they kissed again, without the acrobatics.

  “Does this mean you’ll consider taking me back?” He tried to sound offhand, but his heart was thrashing against his rib cage and he didn’t know what she would say. You left someone you loved, and eventually they stopped loving you back. For all he knew, she had a boyfriend.

  “Do you want to spend the day with me?”

  “I could be your research assistant,” he said. “I’ll check your footnotes for you.”

  “And after today?”

  “I’ll find another task.”

  She made a show of considering it. He had forced her to wait this long; she was going to make him wait a little longer. There was still more to talk about, in any case. Not that she had any doubt.

  She had her coat on and she was out the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the library,” she said. She was already down Fountain Street and he was following her, doing his best to keep up.

  New York, New York

  It was a gigantic building, thrust above the East River, and at the Sixty-eighth Street entrance, where Mia went in, the taxis were navigating around the parked cars and the people in line waiting for the valet. At the information desk, she asked for the Greenberg Pavilion and was directed through a doorway and down a hall to a bank of elevators next to which hung an enormous portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg staring down at passersby.

  She checked her reflection in the elevator doors. She was late. She had taken the express train uptown, and since the local hadn’t been waiting at Fifty-ninth Street, she had decided to walk from there. On days when the weather was good, she ran on the paved path between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, heading north from the West Village, past the meatpacking district and Chelsea and up beyond the turnoff to the Lincoln Tunnel. Other times, she ran on the city streets themselves. Twenty blocks to a mile, everyone said; the taxi meters confirmed it. But the avenue blocks, going west to east, were four times as long. Third Avenue, Second Avenue, First Avenue, York Avenue, the East River: this was a mile in its own right. She could have run, but she was in her work pumps and a skirt, carrying her bag, and she didn’t want to be perspiring when she arrived—though, having walked at a brisk clip, she was, anyway. It was warm, besides, unusually so for April. She removed her sunglasses and placed them in her bag.

  In the waiting room, she flipped through Us Weekly. This was the second time in a week that she’d read Us, for a just few days ago Julian had brought home a copy someone had left on the subway and deposited it in the magazine bin in their bathroom. She had never read Us before, and what she’d wanted to know, leafing through it, was whether Us was more like People or like the National Enquirer. What she meant, she told Julian, was did it pay lip service to the truth, however much it traded in gossip and innuendo, or did it disregard the truth, like the National Enquirer, which reportedly had a large budget reserved for libel settlements?

  “The truth,” Julian snorted. He was working as the assistant to a literary agent. He read the slush pile, passing on the promising material to his boss; he answered the phone, mailed contracts to authors, helped with first serial and subsidiary rights, and fed Lulu, the office cat, who spent most of her day asleep on the boss’s desk square in the middle of a pile of manuscripts. Julian’s boss knew he wrote fiction, and though she was partial to fiction herself—she represented a number of accomplished novelists—what editors were looking for, she told Julian despairingly, was the truth.

  But whose truth? The truth of that reporter who’d been let go by the Times? The truth of George Bush? Of the Gulf War? The publishing world was in the midst of a memoir craze, and many memoirs crossed Julian’s desk. The people who wrote them had led exquisitely painful lives, but this didn’t automatically make them writers. “I suffer, therefore I am,” Professor Chesterfield had said, and it remained true more than fifteen years later. At Iowa, one of Julian’s instructors had complained about passive protagonists to whom bad things happen and who remain inert throughout the story, never making a choice, never doing anything, and so they lack moral complexity. Richard Nixon stories, Julian’s instructor called them. Mistakes were made. But who made these mistakes? Who was responsible? Such were the manuscripts Julian read at the agency and brought home at night, occasionally reading a few lines aloud to Mia.

  Mia went into the bathroom, careful not to upset the urine samples. When she emerged, the receptionist gave her some forms to fill out.

  “Is this your first time here?”

  It was.

  Her medical history was unexceptional, and so she put check mark after check mark in the “No” box, feeling a palpitation nonetheless. She signed her signature at the bottom, releasing the doctor from responsibility for things she wasn’t sure doctors should be released from, but now wasn’t the time to argue. “You don’t accept insurance, do you?”

  They didn’t. But the receptionist agreed to take Mia’s insurance card anyway. Perhaps her insurance company would offer her partial reimbursement for services administered out-of-network.

  “Is there a water fountain here?”

  She was pointed to one.

  Her tongue was dry, her throat parched. She drank lengthily, and almost as soon as she was done she needed to pee again.

  Out the window, she glimpsed a narrow swatch of the East River. Bedpan Alley, this part of the city was called; along York Avenue everyone seemed to be wearing a white coat, a photo ID clipped to their breast pocket. Ambulances patrolled the streets, their lights flaring, a siren going on and off. Just last week a doctor had been mown down by an ambulance. Killed in the line of duty. Memorial Sloan-Kettering was a few blocks away, and the Hospital for Special Surgery. And New York Presbyterian, where Mia was now. Although she was at the hospital, she wasn’t in the hospital, she reminded herself. She was just here for a doctor’s appointment.

  Across from her a woman, perhaps seven months pregnant, was drinking a smoothie, and a few seats away sat another pregnant woman, reading a fashion magazine. A coincidence, Mia thought, before she realized, rebuking herself, that of course it wasn’t a coincidence; she was in the waiting room for ob/gyn. A girl in her late teens emerged crying from the office, followed by a boy roughly the same age. A technician walked purposefully past them, carrying vials of blood down the hall. On the table next to Mia lay a stack of pamphlets with the words THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW written across the cover. One of the pamphlets was about chlamydia, another about AIDS. A nurse emerged and called someone’s name, and Mia, anticipating, stood up, but it was another patient being asked to come in.

  She turned the pages of Us with dutiful solemnity. She and Julian lived in the West Village, home to many of New York’s movie stars, and just last week, when they were out to dinner, Matthew Broderick had been sitting at the table across from them, and it took Mia several moments to realize who he was. She had never thought of herself as out of touch with popular culture, but she was beginning to wonder whether this was so. The joke back in graduate school had been that there was no point in therapists’ going to the movies because their patients had already ruined the e
ndings for them. But Mia was finding she had a different problem. She hadn’t heard of many of the actors her patients mentioned. A friend of hers read People cover to cover every week. It was her version of pornography, her friend said, but flipping through Us, reading the tales of heartbreak and betrayal, of divorce and weight gain and plastic surgery and palimony, Mia was less aroused than bored, and so she put the magazine away.

  She looked out the window, past the East River to Queens. She’d been to Queens a few times recently, out to dinner in Astoria, Flushing, and Jackson Heights, but the borough still bewildered her. Sixty-fifth Street next to Sixty-fifth Avenue next to Sixty-fifth Place: it took a cartographer to understand Queens. Besides, she was still discovering Manhattan. She’d been living in New York for three years now, but she still approached it with the glow of a newcomer; she was glad to see she hadn’t used it up.

  That last semester in Ann Arbor, she’d finally abandoned hope that Julian would return to her, and then he was there, sharing her tiny apartment with her. She’d been planning to stay with Olivia in New York, but Olivia didn’t have room for both her and Julian, so while Mia finished her dissertation, Julian flew to the city to check out rentals. My own private real estate agent, she called him.

  When Julian first said he was joining her in New York, she assumed he was taking a leave of absence from graduate school, but he quickly made clear that he was dropping out. “It’s what I’ve wanted to do from the moment I got there.”

  After a week in Ann Arbor, Julian returned to Iowa and left a rent check for his landlady; he didn’t even consider asking for his security deposit back. Then, having collected his belongings, he stopped by Henry’s house to say goodbye.

  “So this is it?” Henry said. “A semester and a half is enough for you?”

  “Life calls.”

  “It’s probably for the best. It wasn’t pretty in workshop last week.”

  Julian had forgotten. When his mother had called to say his father had left her, he’d departed Iowa City without telling anyone, and he was up in workshop the following week. Apparently, the class had discussed his story anyway. “They acted as if you were there,” Henry said.

  “Which is just the reverse of what they usually do,” Julian said. “Most of the time, they pretend you’re not there even when you are.”

  Henry smiled.

  “So they hanged me in effigy?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “It’s to be expected, I guess.”

  “Don’t worry,” Henry said. “You’ll have the last laugh.”

  “You will too, Henry. I’m counting on you.”

  It was late August when Julian and Mia moved to New York, just weeks before the Twin Towers fell. Welcome to New York City, Mia thought. Someone else might have turned around and left, but if anything, the attacks drew her closer. She and Julian were leaving for work when the planes blew up, and from in front of their apartment building they could see the smoke and hear sirens. In the days and weeks afterward, Mia walked around the city, stupefied. She and Julian volunteered at a shelter a few blocks from where they lived, and they brought pizzas late at night to the Ground Zero workers. Standing in the midst of it all, she felt that she was already an official resident, that she’d been placed on the fast track to becoming a New Yorker.

  “At least it can’t get any worse,” Julian said.

  He was right—though, a month later, Mia was standing on a crowded subway platform when suddenly everyone began to run for the exits. Did somebody have a gun? A bomb? She ran along the platform and up the stairs, but when she got outside and asked people what had happened, no one seemed to know. She scoured the newspapers the next day and couldn’t find anything. It must have been a false alarm. A case of spontaneous panic. She never would find out.

  In the weeks after that incident, she started to walk more, and to run on the streets, for running, she found, was her preferred mode of transport. She would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, her own internal taxi meter clicking, glancing up at the Flatiron and Puck Buildings, discovering a city that now felt like hers.

  She had spent that first year working at the clinic at NYU, treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder (now there were the Ground Zero workers to attend to as well), and then, as she’d planned, she opened a private practice. And maybe it was true that there were more therapists in Manhattan than in Vienna, but there were more patients as well. She came home one night and said to Julian, “You know what? I’m supporting myself.”

  “Hell,” Julian said, “you’re supporting me.”

  But it was because Julian was rich that, once the lease on their apartment ran out, they were able to purchase a brownstone on Perry Street, a couple of blocks from where they lived. “Let’s buy a building,” Julian said, and that word, “building,” seemed right to Mia, for he might as well have said, “Let’s buy the Chrysler Building,” owning a home was that foreign to her.

  It had been a year now since they’d bought their brownstone, but Mia still liked to recall the day they moved in, Julian upstairs propping the doors open, the movers, an Israeli and two Mexicans, at her side, communicating in a medley of Hebrew and Spanish. Across the street stood the bakery she’d soon be getting coffee from. Everything that surrounded her felt like props that had been erected solely for the enactment of her new life. All that had happened until now had been simply a prelude.

  Then the movers were gone, and it was just her and Julian amid the piles of boxes and the furniture in bubble wrap. “This is our home,” she said.

  Julian smiled.

  “Our home, our home, our home, our home.” She couldn’t recall having been this happy.

  Yet in the months that followed, she kept waiting for something to go wrong, and now, sitting at the doctor’s office, she was convinced it had. A girl of about fourteen entered the waiting room, her mother at her side. Mia recognized the look on the girl’s face, for when she herself had been that age she’d visited the gynecologist for the first time, and though she couldn’t have imagined going on her own, it seemed even worse to be accompanied by her mother. She had a boyfriend at the time; they wouldn’t have sex for another year, but she was fitted for a diaphragm that day. At heart, her mother was a prude, but she had considered it her duty not to be one, and so she’d gone out of her way to be open about sex with Mia. Though Mia hadn’t wanted to talk about it with her. To this day, she felt that sex was about separation from your parents, and she thought that if she ever had a daughter she would spare her the talks her mother had given her, the effort she’d made to appear liberal and broad-minded, the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that had appeared at her bedside the day she turned fifteen.

  In the examining room, she was given a gown and told to undress. “How are you today?” the nurse said.

  Mia, dreading the companionship of strangers, did her best to be polite while hoping to discourage further exchange. “I’m fine,” she said, though the truth was she’d been agitated all day, sufficiently so that she’d contemplated canceling her therapy sessions. She hadn’t, because she believed doing so was irresponsible and she prided herself on not missing appointments. Besides, she thought seeing patients would distract her. But it hadn’t in the end.

  The nurse removed the blood pressure kit. She was big-boned and stout, a redhead of about forty-five who had the bustling, efficient manner of the competent. She rolled up Mia’s sleeve.

  “Will we be doing it here?”

  The nurse laughed. “As opposed to outside?”

  What Mia meant was would they be doing it where she was now, sitting on the examining table with her legs dangling down. She’d read that the most accurate way to gauge blood pressure was with the patient in a chair, feet on the floor. Dangling your legs required more exertion and contributed to falsely elevated blood pressure readings. But she said none of this. Her blood pressure tended to be on the low side of normal, and now, when the nurse began to pump, the machine read a hundred over fif
ty-three, which was, in fact, the low side of normal.

  Alone now, Mia waited for the doctor. Her clothes were folded in a pile on the chair. She’d placed her underwear beneath her skirt so it wouldn’t be visible when the doctor came in, though she knew the doctor would be seeing her naked. But she wanted her clothes to appear presentable whether they were on her or not. Dozens of pale hairs clung to her skirt, and she did her best to remove them, even searching through her bag for a lint brush, but she seemed to have forgotten it. A black skirt. A Yellow Labrador puppy. Though all her clothes, no matter what their color, were covered with dog hair. And the furniture, the floor, everything. She had complained to Julian about it, but she’d wanted the dog as much as he had. They’d been talking about a puppy for a few years now, really since the time they’d moved to New York, and once they became homeowners and there was no landlord to get in the way, they began to consider it in earnest. They’d joked that it would be training wheels for a baby. They would have a house and a dog. Welcome to the life of the bourgeoisie. As if they hadn’t been part of it all along.

  She and Julian were thirty-six now. Julian had returned to his novel, he was finally making progress, and they had agreed that in a year, whether he had finished it or not, they would try to have a baby.

  But they’d never done anything about getting a dog besides stare in the windows of the pet stores they passed, watching the puppies wrestle with one another. “Impulse buy?” she’d said to Julian once. But they never would have gotten a puppy from a pet store; those dogs came from puppy mills. Still, they gazed desirously at the Collie and Golden Retriever puppies that seemed to grace every catalogue that arrived in the mail, as if the dogs themselves were screaming, “Buy me!”

  And then, a couple of months ago, Julian ran into an old high school friend at the supermarket, and when he glanced inside his friend’s shopping bag he saw a Yellow Labrador puppy asleep inside it. The dog was six months old and fully house-trained. His friend was looking for a good home for him.