Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  “You mean I can have him?” Julian said.

  “He’s yours.”

  So it had been an impulse buy, after all. And Julian hadn’t even had to buy him.

  They quickly learned, however, that anyone who thought a dog was training wheels for a baby had never actually owned a dog. If anything, Mia thought, a baby might be training wheels for a dog. That first morning, she came back to their bedroom to find that the puppy had eviscerated their pillows. And on the bathroom floor lay a puddle of urine. “I thought you said he was house-trained.”

  Julian rubbed the puppy behind the ears. “He’s probably just nervous. At least he made into the right room.”

  Later that day, when Mia came home from work, she found Julian and the puppy on the living floor surrounded by dog paraphernalia. The biggest item was a crate, which stood fully assembled, and by its sides was an assortment of stuffed toys, all with noisemakers in them. There was a collar, a Frisbee, and two bowls. There were sterilized bones flavored with chicken and liver, Nylabones flavored with beef, and what Julian claimed were pigs’ ears. There were—Mia couldn’t believe this—dog goggles. “Doggles,” said the package. “To protect your dog from sun, wind, and debris.” Julian had bought a book of names and a pile of index cards; when he found a name he liked, he wrote it on the front of the index card, and on the back he wrote the name’s etymology and history.

  “What are you saying? I choose a card and that’s the name we give the dog?”

  “If we like it.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We try again.”

  Mia picked a card. “This isn’t a name. It’s a biography.”

  “Flip the card over.”

  “Leila?”

  “It’s from the Arabic chapter.”

  “You bought a book about Arabic dogs?”

  “It’s not a book about dogs. It’s a book about names. There’s an Arabic chapter and a Welsh chapter and a Korean chapter and a Polish chapter and a Slovakian chapter. Thirty-five thousand names in all, Arabic ones included.”

  “‘Leila,’” Mia read. “‘Derived from the Arabic Leila—night, dark beauty—or the Persian Leila—dark-haired. Used in George Byron’s poem ‘The Giaour.’” Julian, isn’t Leila a girl’s name?”

  Julian admitted that it was.

  “But this dog’s a boy.”

  “True.”

  “How about we eliminate the girls’ names?”

  “You’re giving up some good ones.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tusa. Native American name. It means Prairie Dog. But we still have the Native American Kangi Sunka, which is male and means Crow Dog. Or Elaskolatat, also Native American, also male. Then there’s the Scandinavian Dag. As in Hammarskjöld. Alternatively, we could give him a Japanese name.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because I love sushi.”

  “You’re going to eat the dog?”

  “We can call him Hideo,” Julian said, “which means excellent male, or Yukio, which means snow boy, or Ozuru, which means big stork—”

  “How about Cooper?” Mia said.

  “Why Cooper?”

  “Because I like the name.”

  So it was decided: Cooper it was.

  Now, though, sitting in the doctor’s office, her legs sticking to the paper on the examining table so that two blotches of sweat were imprinted on it in the shape of her thighs, Mia thought how foolish they’d been. Because now, with what was about to happen, maybe they couldn’t handle a baby or a dog.

  She got down from the examining table, scolding herself. Nothing was about to happen. She had no idea.

  On the wall across from her hung a poster of a woman’s insides, the vaginal canal and fallopian tubes, the uterus and ovaries. She felt as if she’d been photographed for everyone to see, turned inside out like a pair of trousers. She thought of fifth-grade health class, the boys in one room, the girls in another room down the hall, the damp scent of mothballs as the girls, in their knee socks and sweaters, sat staring at the screen on the chalkboard, the taste of humiliation on their breath. She recalled anticipating a throat culture, that long toothpick like something you’d spear marshmallows with, and then the doctor’s voice, “It’s over now, wasn’t that easy?,” his hand sliding into his coat pocket where a lollipop was secreted. She’d always been afraid of doctors. She still was, though she was a doctor herself. A different kind of doctor, but then therapists could be the scariest doctors of all. Though she’d never felt that way about her own therapist, only about medical doctors, which was how she felt now, wishing she weren’t here.

  There was a knock on the door and she started. “Who is it?” She cinched the tie on her gown.

  “Dr. Kaplan,” a voice said. “May I come in?”

  “Oh. Yes.” She’d forgotten. The doctor and nurse saw you undressed, but they didn’t see you getting undressed. They knocked on the door, as if this were your office, not theirs. Not that she didn’t appreciate the gesture.

  “Emily Kaplan,” the doctor said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Mia slid off the examining table and shook the doctor’s hand. Then she mentioned the friend who had recommended her, another patient of Dr. Kaplan’s. Dr. Kaplan smiled in acknowledgment, and Mia waited for her to say something, but she didn’t respond and a moment of awkwardness settled between them.

  Dr. Kaplan appeared about forty, and she had straight blond hair cut bluntly above the shoulders, a small face, and light blue eyes. She was wearing street clothes: a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt open at the collar. “Are you here for a regular checkup?”

  “No,” Mia said.

  Dr. Kaplan glanced up.

  “I think I have a lump in my breast. At least, that’s what it feels like.”

  “When did you discover this?”

  “Yesterday. I thought I might have been imagining it, but I check my breasts every month and this feels different. My mother died of breast cancer,” she added.

  “When?”

  “Fourteen years ago.”

  “How old was she when she was diagnosed?”

  “Fifty.” Mia corrected herself. Her mother had been forty-nine when she’d been diagnosed, fifty when she died. She still couldn’t believe it. It had all been over in less than a year.

  “Do you know whether she was pre- or post-menopausal?”

  Mia shook her head. “Does it make a difference?”

  “It can. Pre- and post-menopausal breast cancer often have different characteristics.”

  “I could ask my father,” she said.

  Dr. Kaplan nodded. “This may very well turn out to be nothing, but it would be good to know in any case.” She started to stand up, then sat down again. “I’m sure this is quite frightening for you, but you should know that with breast cancer there are many false alarms.”

  “Benign lumps?”

  “There are a lot of those, certainly. And I’ve had patients who thought they had a lump who turned out to have nothing at all. Breast tissue can be quite dense.”

  Dr. Kaplan administered a breast exam, moving painstakingly around the tissue, beginning at the center of the breast and moving to the sides, up toward the armpits, where the lymph nodes lay, starting with the left breast, then the right. At one point she stopped and went over the same spot several times, and Mia wanted to say, “Did you find something?,” but the words wouldn’t come out.

  She had been in the shower when she discovered the lump, and she was too agitated to do anything at first. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply the angle at which she had approached the breast, or the temperature of the water. Also, she was expecting her period soon, and her breasts got tender before she menstruated. But this wasn’t tenderness she felt. She thought of calling Julian, but he was already at work, and she was too frightened to tell him. When she got out of the shower, she checked again, and this time she immediately called a friend who came from a family of doctors and asked for the
name of the best gynecologist in New York. That was how she’d ended up at Dr. Kaplan, who had a three-month waiting list for an appointment but who, thanks to Mia’s friend, found her a spot the very next day.

  Dr. Kaplan was conducting an internal exam. She had Mia’s feet in the stirrups and was placing the speculum inside her. Maybe, Mia thought, she didn’t have a breast lump, which was why Dr. Kaplan could focus on something so mundane. Or maybe she did have a breast lump and Dr. Kaplan was checking for other problems, too. What if she had cancer and it had already spread? But she could ascertain none of this because she was dry-mouthed, mute, lying with her legs spread, while Dr. Kaplan, steadfast, silent herself, went about the business of examining her.

  Mia got dressed quickly and left the gown on the chair before realizing there was a bin in which to deposit used gowns. The piece of paper on which she’d been sitting still had her sweat stains on it, and she wanted to get rid of that, too, but she didn’t know what to do with it.

  Down the hall in Dr. Kaplan’s office, she sat staring at the diplomas on the wall. Dr. Kaplan had graduated from Princeton and NYU Medical School. She’d done her residency and internship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. There was a photo of a girl on the desk, blond like Dr. Kaplan, about seven years old, but there were no photos of a husband. Maybe, Mia thought, Dr. Kaplan was divorced. Maybe her husband had died, maybe there had never been a husband, maybe she was gay, maybe she’d had the child on her own, maybe it wasn’t her child but a niece, or a cousin.

  “You’re right,” Dr. Kaplan said. “You have a lump in your breast.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s quite small. Less than a centimeter.” Dr. Kaplan held out her thumbnail and bisected it. “It could easily prove to be nothing.”

  “Even though my mother…”

  “There are lots of benign lumps out there, but it’s the malignant ones, understandably, that get all the press. That said, I think we should have it checked out.”

  “Get a biopsy?” This, Mia thought, was how it all started. You found something suspicious and you had a biopsy. With a shudder, she remembered that call from her father senior year of college. Something’s wrong with Mom.

  “It’s done over in Oncology,” Dr. Kaplan said. “They should be able to fit you in at the beginning of next week.”

  “I can’t get it done today?”

  “It’s already four o’clock.”

  “How about tomorrow?” She couldn’t endure having to wait. She wanted the lump out, whether it was malignant or not.

  Dr. Kaplan left the office, and when she returned she said, “How does ten o’clock tomorrow morning sound to you?”

  “Thank you,” Mia said. “I truly, truly appreciate it.” Then she was out of the office and through the corridor, back into the pitiless heat.

  At home, she watered the plants and put in a load of laundry. She wandered around the house, from the first floor to the second to the third, walking from room to room as if to make sure the house hadn’t rearranged itself, her footsteps reverberating across the hallway, the white and black squares like on a gigantic chessboard. She could hear Cooper barking downstairs. When they got him, Cooper was supposed to be confined at first, and then, slowly, if he wasn’t having accidents, he would be granted greater access to the house. But every time they increased his space he wanted them to increase it more, and he would place his paws up on the gate that was designed to pen him in. Finally, they succumbed and gave him the run of the house.

  She took him for a walk, down Perry Street and over onto Hudson, where she tied him to a parking meter outside the supermarket. She picked up some lamb chops for dinner. She wanted to indulge in the rituals of normalcy—dinner, a bottle of wine; maybe later she and Julian would have sex—and somewhere, between all that, she would have to tell Julian what she’d discovered. He would end up assuring her the lump was benign because at his core he was optimistic, but also because she worried about health and he tried to balance her out. He liked to accuse her of hypochondria, and she had to concede he was right. After her mother died, she’d cut back on meat and processed foods and started going to the gym several times a week. But she remained anxious about her health. Once, finding a rash on her leg, she had been convinced she had Lyme disease. When Julian pointed out the odds against this—they’d been living in Ann Arbor at the time; there were no deer ticks on State Street—she was only half reassured. Just to prove she could do it, she went for months without reading the Science Times, which had been the section of the paper she read most carefully. She bullied herself into not worrying and, to her surprise, it worked. A semester would pass and she’d realize she hadn’t been concerned about her health, that she’d gone back to how she’d been before her mother died, with the casual, unthinking trust of the vigorous. But then something would happen and she couldn’t even pinpoint what—an article she’d read, a phone call from her father in Montreal, sometimes, as far as she could tell, nothing—and she’d be back to where she’d been months before, obscurely, distantly fretful.

  Now, a block from home, she saw her neighbor approaching. He was a young, prematurely graying man whose name she could never remember. He seemed not to recall her name either, for whenever they passed each other they would smile exaggeratedly, as if trying to compensate for something. He had a dog, too—Buddha, a white creature so tiny Cooper didn’t know what to do with him and he had to be reminded Buddha wasn’t a ball. When Cooper and Buddha played, Mia and Buddha’s owner talked about dog things. But alone, they acted lost. It was that way with dog owners in general. When you saw them without their dogs, you didn’t know what to say. It was as if you had run into them naked.

  She laid out the lamb chops on the kitchen counter and made a salad. Then she took a bath, descending beneath the bubbles, cleansing herself of the grime and perspiration, hoping to wash away the breast lump itself, which, like someone testing a toothache, she palpated when she got out.

  Someone had left a message on the answering machine, and when she heard Julian’s voice, telling her he loved her, she started to cry. She lay down on the floor with Cooper next to her, wiping her face with his ears.

  By the time Julian got home, she was dressed. The Last Supper, she told herself dramatically, but she couldn’t pretend she felt otherwise.

  “Guess who called today,” Julian said.

  “Who?”

  “Professor Chesterfield. He finally finished his novel. He’s looking for a new agent.”

  She sat down on the sofa, staring glumly at him.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m just tired.”

  She went upstairs and lay down, turning on the radio to some classical music in the hope that it would soothe her. In the bathroom, she washed her hands and face, scrubbing her pores until her cheeks shone.

  “Mia?” he called out. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  But when she came downstairs, she found Cooper in the kitchen with the lamb chops in his mouth.

  “Jesus Christ, Julian! That was supposed to be our dinner!”

  Cooper dropped the remains at her feet, then continued to ravage them, moving from one lamb chop to the other as if unable to decide which appealed more. At least she’d caught him in the act. According to the dog books, if you didn’t catch your dog in the moment of transgression he wouldn’t understand what you were upset about. But even in the moment of transgression, Cooper appeared unrepentant. He seemed too stuffed to care.

  “Look what your dog did,” Mia said, and she let out a litany of complaints, about how everything revolved around Cooper, his walks, his feeding schedule, how he lay in the hallway, immobile as a sack of grain, as if daring you to step on him, only to rise suddenly to thump his tail against your knee. His toys made appearances all over the house, under the bed, between the sofa cushions, in a whimsical rite of buri
al and disinterment. She had never seen a dog so obsessed with food. The sound of her pouring out her vitamins resembled Cooper’s food going into his bowl, so she was forced to take her vitamins out of Cooper’s earshot; otherwise he would bark. Just the other day, she’d fished inside her pocket to give a homeless man a quarter and she’d mistakenly given him one of Cooper’s treats. Another time, she or Julian had left treats in a pocket, and when the clothes came out of the wash everything smelled like stew. Julian had taken to dressing Cooper up, not in dog clothes, but in political placards such as BONES, NOT BOMBS, which Cooper had worn dutifully around his neck to a gay rights rally, though what bones or bombs had to do with gay rights she had no idea. Cooper, cave dweller that he was, liked to lie beneath Julian’s desk, the bottom beam of which he would maneuver himself under as if doing the limbo. Man and his dog, Mia thought, and she, as co-owner of that dog, wasn’t allowed to say certain words in her own home, lest Cooper misunderstand. “Hurry up” was forbidden because that was what they said to Cooper when he was supposed to pee, so if they said it in the house he would pee on the floor. Forbidden, also, were “walk,” “food,” “outside,” and “park”—she couldn’t even ask Julian where he’d parked the car without Cooper, their hapless dog, starting to bark, so she was reduced to searching for synonyms, or whispering the words, or saying them in a different language.

  “Jesus, Mia. It’s just a couple of lamb chops. I’ll go out and pick us up a pizza.”

  She started to cry. “I have a lump in my breast.”

  “What?”

  Through the window, she could see Perry Street buckle, the sidewalk folding in on itself. Everything looked flat, as if the city were a sheet of paper out of which the pedestrians had been fashioned and everyone was falling through it. “Julian, I might have cancer.”

  Julian’s lip shook. He reached out to steady himself. No, she wanted to say. She needed him to be unwavering. She was crying now, and he was doing his best not to cry himself, and only barely succeeding.