Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  So Mia stayed up late talking with Julian, flipping through the articles she’d copied. There was some evidence that pregnancy was protective against breast cancer. Nursing was supposed to be protective, too. “I thought you wanted to have a baby.”

  “I do,” Julian said.

  She looked up at him. “On the other hand, we could adopt.”

  Finally, after weeks of vacillating (she even proposed, half seriously, that they flip a coin), she announced that she wanted to have a baby.

  “You mean through sex?”

  She laughed. “Yes, through sex.”

  How incongruous it was, not just the act of unprotected sex but the very fact of wishing to get pregnant when for so long she’d hoped she wouldn’t, when back in college her period had been late a couple of times and she’d been frantic. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t given thought to infertility. She’d spent so many years afraid she was fertile, it was hard to change course now.

  But three months elapsed, and she realized she had no right to be complacent about getting pregnant, that having the gene didn’t earn her a pass.

  She called Dr. Kaplan, who told her it was too early to panic. “It takes six months for the typical thirty-year-old to get pregnant,” Dr. Kaplan said. “And you’re thirty-six, so there’s probably nothing wrong with you.”

  But there was something wrong with her. She had the breast cancer gene, and every month she didn’t get pregnant was another month she could get sick. She watched her diet and tried to get more sleep, but when two more months passed and, despite having used home ovulation tests, she still hadn’t gotten pregnant, she became abject.

  Finally, after six months of trying, she returned to Dr. Kaplan, who agreed to send her to a fertility specialist. “But I’m warning you,” Dr. Kaplan said. “The doctor is going to put you on Clomid.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, necessarily. But there’s a suspected link to ovarian cancer. It hasn’t been proved, but in general, you don’t want to take these drugs unless there’s a good reason.”

  The last article Mia had read suggested she had a fifty-four percent chance of developing ovarian cancer. How much worse could her odds be?

  Finally, like an alcoholic, she drank half a bottle of Robitussin. The theory was that cough syrup thinned the mucus in your body, and a woman’s cervical mucus needed to be thin so that sperm could get through it. But as Mia stood in the bathroom with the bottle of Robitussin pressed to her lips, aware that no studies had proven a connection between cough syrup and fertility, she felt like a crackpot.

  Yet almost as soon as she and Julian started to try again, she felt a low-grade queasiness she couldn’t account for; even if she was pregnant, it was far too early for morning sickness.

  “Maybe you’re just anxious,” Julian said.

  “About what?”

  “Your special lunch?” Julian had just emerged from the shower, and he stood before Mia in his towel, dripping water on the floor.

  “Oh, come on.” Julian was talking about Derek, she realized. Derek from Japan. He was visiting New York with his son, and she’d arranged to have lunch with them. Her Japanese boyfriend, Julian called Derek, and the more she resisted, the more he poked fun.

  The last time Mia saw Derek, they were nineteen, and it was as if she’d overcompensated, for she imagined him now in his fifties instead of his thirties. So when she saw him again, standing in front of a bodega on Eighth Avenue, she was doubly surprised to see he’d hardly aged. His hair was graying at the temples, but other than that he appeared just as he had, his cheeks pale and unmottled, his bangs falling across his face. “Derek, you look exactly the same.”

  “You do, too,” he said, and he shook her hand.

  When Derek had said he was bringing his son, Mia had imagined a boy of seven or eight, but the young man next to Derek appeared sixteen.

  “We’re visiting universities,” Derek explained. “Rodney wants to go to school in the United States.” He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder. He’s just like me when I was his age. He’s already given himself an American name.”

  Mia looked at Rodney, then at Derek. “You have a son who’s going to college?”

  “I got married young.”

  “So did I.”

  “But you don’t have a child who’s ready for college?”

  Mia smiled sadly. “I don’t have children at all.” She reached into her bag. “Here,” she said, “let me buy you a drink,” and she returned from the bodega holding three cans of Coke, and they stood on the street corner drinking them.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Mia said to Derek. “What does your wife do? Do you have other children besides Rodney?”

  “It’s just me and Rodney,” Derek said. “I don’t have a wife.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  “Actually, my wife died.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She got discomposed after that, and it seemed for the next couple of hours she didn’t know what to say. So she contented herself with wandering around Manhattan with Derek and Rodney, taking them to South Street Seaport and the Empire State Building, talking about the differences between Columbia and NYU.

  Eventually, though, Rodney tired of adult company and left Mia and Derek alone in Central Park. Runners loped around the reservoir; a girl on a skateboard whizzed past them. A unicyclist juggling bowling pins emerged from behind the bend, and a crowd gathered to watch him.

  “It’s New York,” Mia explained. She sat down on a park bench next to Derek, and soon a flock of pigeons approached them. One was picking at something by Derek’s feet.

  “It’s funny,” Derek said. “Rodney’s always telling me I should feed the pigeons. He says I need to relax.”

  “Do you?”

  “Probably. I work too hard. It’s true of men of my generation. Maybe of men of all generations. But Rodney swears he’s going to be different. That’s why he wants to come to college in the U.S. He thinks university students in America have more fun. They sleep late and drink more beer.”

  “There’s some of that,” Mia said, remembering her students at the University of Michigan.

  “I guess if you don’t drink beer at college, when are you going to drink?”

  “So you’re not worried?”

  Derek shook his head. “Rodney will probably find he’s more serious than he realized. Away from my influence, he’ll turn out just like me. It’s what happened with me and my father.”

  “Is he an economics professor, too?”

  “No,” Derek said, “but temperamentally we’re the same.” A group of preschool children walked past them, everyone in pairs, holding hands. “Why? What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a psychotherapist,” Mia said.

  “Is that what you studied in college? Psychology?”

  She shook her head. She’d taken a psychology course her sophomore year, but half of what she learned seemed so obviously true she wasn’t sure why anyone bothered to teach it, and the other half seemed just as obviously false. Everything felt as if it were straight from a psychology textbook, which shouldn’t have surprised her, because it was. “My mother died, and I started to see a therapist myself. Before that, I hadn’t considered it as a career.”

  “Are you a good therapist?”

  Mia laughed.

  “Why? Has no one asked you that before?”

  “Not so directly.” And she remembered now how forthright Derek had been, and how it had disarmed her.

  She said, “People make fun of therapists for projecting themselves as a blank screen. The patient asks them a question, and all they can say is, ‘What do you think?’ But I’ve got the opposite problem. I’m too quick to say what’s on my mind. It’s the product of being a big sister. I’m a know-it-all. She looked up at him. What about you, Derek? Are you a good economist?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I think I’m too good. Remember in France, whe
n we went out to eat, how quickly I could calculate the tax? You taught me that phrase, ‘the three R’s.’ Reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. I was good at them.”

  “But especially arithmetic?”

  Derek nodded. “Economics was the easy path for me. I have a friend who was a stutterer when he was a child and he ended up becoming a politician. Compared to him, I’m a coward.”

  “Why?” she said. “What would you have been if not an economist?”

  “A musician, maybe?”

  “I didn’t know you played music.”

  “That’s the point. I don’t. But I could have tried. It would have been a challenge.”

  Mia laughed.

  “But no,” he said. “I’ve been happy professionally.”

  “But not in other ways?”

  “My wife died,” he said. “It’s hard to get over something like that.”

  Mia thought of her father, who seemed to have recovered from her mother’s death. He went to work every morning. He had friends. Most of the time he appeared happy. But it had been fifteen years since her mother had died, and he still thought of her every day. He’d told her this once and it startled her. Though she didn’t know why. She thought of her mother every day, too.

  “I have a colleague whose wife was killed in a plane crash, and less than a year later he got married again. I guess some people fall in love easily.” He looked up at her. “What about you?”

  “Do I fall in love easily?”

  “Tell me about Julian,” he said. “He’s a fiction writer?”

  She nodded.

  “And you love him?”

  She laughed. “Yes, I love Julian. We had some difficulties—we were separated for a while—but things are better now.” She looked up at Derek. “How long ago did your wife die?”

  “When Rodney was three.”

  “So you raised him on your own?”

  Derek nodded. “And now he’s getting ready to go to university. It’s not easy when they leave. That year in Provence, my mother cried at the airport when I left, and I thought, What are you crying about?”

  “And now you understand?”

  “Absolutely.” Derek glanced at his watch. He’d agreed to meet Rodney, he told Mia, at the Metropolitan Museum. Mia had to leave, too, but she decided to walk him partway there.

  Above them, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, and as they made their way across the open meadow, Mia could see Fifth Avenue, its majestic apartment buildings lined up like gift boxes. “So you never remarried?”

  “I almost did,” Derek said. “But Rodney was twelve at the time, and he and my fiancée didn’t get along. In the end, she wasn’t right for me.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I sort of have a girlfriend.”

  “Sort of? Does your girlfriend know you feel this way?”

  “Look who’s talking,” Derek said. “You were Miss Sort Of yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You sort of had a boyfriend, too. What was his name? Glen?”

  “How do you remember that?”

  “You made an impression on me.”

  And an image came to Mia of Derek tossing a mango from hand to hand, the two of them weaving through the streets of Aix, Derek on his way back from class, carrying his knapsack of groceries. She wondered what would have happened if she’d let herself love Derek. She imagined herself in Kyoto, mother to his children, and for a moment it seemed as possible as the life she’d lived, as any path she might have taken. “Do you still like Derek and the Dominos?”

  He nodded. “How about you? Did you ever learn to eat fish?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then how am I going to host you in Japan?” Derek gave her his business card and he was off, his gaze focused on something in the sky, but all Mia could see was a flock of birds.

  She cried out, “If Rodney comes to college here, have him look me up!”

  “I will!” Derek said.

  She ran after him. “Derek, I’m pregnant!”

  She had no idea how she knew this. But two weeks later, when she took a pregnancy test, she barely had time to celebrate with Julian because she was already feeling nauseated. It usually took a month for morning sickness to set in, but with her it had been almost instantaneous.

  Now, five months pregnant, at her college reunion, she found that nothing about her pregnancy had gone as she’d anticipated. She’d assumed she would be one of those trim pregnant women, someone with a little bump for a stomach, but she could see now that this wouldn’t be so: she’d already gained fifteen pounds, and much of it was in her face. She was famished all the time, yet the food she craved also repulsed her. And only in the past week, well after the end of her first trimester, had the nausea begun to subside. In these middle months—the most endurable trimester, everyone said—she was still so tired she often went to sleep as soon as she got home and didn’t wake up until the morning. What she felt, above all, was despondent; she was carrying something alien inside her. This must have been what postpartum depression felt like, only hers had arrived months early.

  At particularly bad moments, she wondered why she’d wanted a baby at all. She’d always liked children, and she still looked forward to the holiday cards that arrived every year from her family in Aix; Claudette, unbelievably, was in university now; Emile would be starting next year. Some of her patients were children, and she enjoyed the play-acting and board games, a therapy through indirection that was altogether different from how she worked with adults. Yet when she tried to recapture what she’d felt just months ago, that instinctive, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce, it was as if she were remembering someone else. She recalled what it had been like for her mother to get sick, and she thought she had made the wrong decision. She should have had her ovaries removed. Then, if they wanted to, she and Julian could have adopted.

  But there was nothing to do about that now. She lay in her underwear, perspiring, on the dormitory bed, and no matter how many times she showered she couldn’t get comfortable.

  Other reunion classes had returned as well, but only the class of ’90 was treated to a special convocation by the president of Graymont, who, having taken office their freshman year, was now going back to teaching. “I came when you came and I leave when you return. I look out at you today from this podium, a hundred and eighty strong, and I’m proud to say I’ve watched you grow up.”

  As if to disprove this, someone made a farting noise.

  The president listed his accomplishments. He had doubled the endowment and overseen the creation of a Latino studies department and an African American studies department; a new library had been built; in the last five years, Graymont had graduated more Rhodes Scholars per capita than any other college in the country. “But this isn’t about me,” the president said. “This is about you.”

  The students roared.

  “Among you are lawyers, doctors, artists, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs. But I want to single out for special mention those students in the class of ’ninety who have, in good Graymont tradition, taken paths that are a little more offbeat.”

  “Where’s Tuckahoe?” someone shouted. Cameron Tuckahoe had been the rumored baker of the hash brownies that had gotten the dean of admissions stoned.

  “We have a former member of the United States Olympics Luge team,” the president said.

  “God bless you, Baker!” someone called out.

  Back in college, Ted Baker had prepared himself for the Olympics by leading his team to the gold medal in the Graymont Bong Olympics, which involved running up ten flights of stairs while stoned.

  Soon the president finished speaking, and everyone dispersed across the quad. Julian greeted Michael Manheim, who fifteen years ago had come to graduation in a gorilla suit. (Jimmy Carter had gotten an honorary degree that day, and Michael had tried to place a wreath of bananas around the former president’s neck before being apprehended by the Secret Service.) Since then
, whenever Julian thought of Michael he pictured a gorilla, so that now he was half startled to see him upright, looking every bit as human as the rest of the class.

  “People expect me to have grown hair on my back,” Michael said. “And do you know what? I have.”

  Julian wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.

  “And on my shoulders and coming out of my ears.”

  Or that.

  Paisley McDonald was talking with Norman Stevens, and next to them was Astrid, from Professor Chesterfield’s class. Astrid had undergone a transformation since graduating from college. “I’m a ‘do-me’ feminist,” she kept saying, which meant, if Julian understood her, that she was a sex-loving feminist, not a sex-hating feminist.

  A child zigzagged across the lawn, searching for her parents. According to the Class of ’90 Survey, sixty-eight percent of the class was married and fifty-six percent had children. People were swapping photos of their children, and Tom Monroe, who stood in the shadows of Christ Church talking to Alison Thompson and her husband, was passing around a photo not of his child but of a missing child from a milk carton—as a teenager, Tom had collected, as he liked to say, “the whole series”—which prompted Alison to say, “Tom, you’re sick.”

  “Do you know who I am?” someone asked Julian. It was Cara Friedberg, from Professor Chesterfield’s class.

  Julian shook Cara’s hand.

  “I hope you don’t remember that story I wrote. The one about the girl breaking up with her boyfriend at the pizza joint?”

  Julian admitted that he did.

  “Anyway, I want you to know I’ve gotten a lot better. A story of mine is being published this fall.”

  Soon Julian was off to say hello to other classmates. But quickly he tired of this, for no sooner had he exchanged a few sentences than he found he had little else to say; everyone gravitated toward a bland nostalgia. So he decamped to the other side of the quad, to wander around campus alone.

  Outside Andrews Hall, he picked up a copy of The Graymont Alumnus and flipped to the Class Notes. The students who submitted to Class Notes were the same ones who in college, full of good cheer, could be seen walking backward across campus wearing the maroon ribbons given them by the admissions office and leading a tour of prospective college students. The world could be divided, Julian thought, between the people who submitted to Class Notes and the people who didn’t. A few members of his class had already died, and they were by and large people he’d liked. That was the way alumni bulletins worked. The people you disliked were accomplishing things, and the people you liked were dead.