Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  The next morning, taking a break from activities, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “Don’t say anything,” Carter said.

  Julian was sitting under a tree, and he rose to greet Carter. “Well, this is a surprise. You weren’t on the list of people attending.”

  “And if I had been, you probably wouldn’t have come yourself.” Carter was wearing a white T-shirt, chinos, and running sneakers, and he was sporting a couple of days’ growth of blond beard. He looked older, Julian thought, though Julian must have looked older, too; he hadn’t seen Carter in six years.

  And there it was. Carter’s voice. The guy who could imitate a loon so well even the loons thought he was one of them.

  “Anyway,” Carter said, “I’ve come back so you can spit in my face. Or punch me, if you’d prefer.”

  “It’s too late,” Julian said.

  “In that case, can I talk to you?”

  Julian nodded.

  “But not here, with all the glad-handing and back-slapping. I’ve never been to a reunion in my life, and it pains me to break my record.”

  They passed Pickens Hall and McMillan Library, and now they stood looking up at the registrar’s office, where Mia had worked after graduation. “The funny thing is, I never thought of you as the reunion type, either.”

  “I’m not,” Julian admitted. “But Mia and I met here. I’ve become nostalgic in my middle age.”

  “Is that how you see yourself? Middle-aged?”

  “A lot has happened.”

  They stopped in front of the statue of Theodore Graymont, abolitionist hero and educational reformer, founder of the college in 1878. Freshman year, Carter climbed that statue and painted a Native American headdress on Theodore Graymont’s head while Julian snapped photos.

  Now Julian asked Carter what he remembered about college.

  “I remember getting drunk and vomiting at the foot of that statue. And I remember that Theodore Graymont had four children—Wendell, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Clarence—and two more who died at birth. At least, that’s what the tour guides said.”

  They walked across the lawn past the president’s house. “President Vickers is retiring,” Julian said. “He gave a speech to us yesterday. He came when we came, he leaves when we return…”

  “So he’s still an idiot.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Carter stopped walking. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “What?”

  “Shoot the shit. Not that you aren’t my favorite person to shoot the shit with. But that’s not why I came here.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “To apologize,” Carter said. “And to tell you how lucky I was to have you as a friend.”

  “Heinz…”

  “When I heard that you and Mia had separated, I fell into the worst funk, and I didn’t come out of it until you’d gotten back together.”

  “So you’ve been keeping tabs on me.”

  “I think about you every day,” Carter said. “I’ve had other friends over the years, good friends, mind you, but it’s not the same. I suspect it’s been ages since you’ve thought about me, and I’m not going to stand here beating my chest over something you probably don’t care about any longer.”

  “I do care about it,” Julian said. Not the fact that Carter had slept with Mia. He’d let go of that, finally, when he returned to her; at a certain point it was time to move on. What he cared about was that Carter was here. And though he didn’t think about Carter every day, he thought about him, in fact, quite infrequently, he’d had to endeavor to reach that point. And seeing him again made Julian realize he had been thinking about Carter, even as he’d convinced himself he hadn’t been.

  “I’m truly, truly sorry for what I did. I’m sorry, also, for having been such an asshole it makes me wonder why you were my friend.”

  “Heinz, come on.”

  “Seriously, have you ever met anyone with such a big chip on his shoulder?”

  Julian laughed.

  “What did I have to complain about? I got a scholarship to prep school and college. I graduated from an excellent law school, and before I was thirty I was handed seventeen million dollars just for showing up to work.”

  “You should give yourself more credit.”

  “I spent so much of my life feeling aggrieved I didn’t know what to do without my indignation.” He looked up at Julian. “Listen to me. I sound like I’ve been in therapy.”

  “Have you been?”

  “Sylvie—my girlfriend—convinced me to go into it.”

  “And you’ve become a believer?”

  “It’s worked for me. Or maybe I should say it’s working. What about you? Have you ever seen a therapist?”

  “I see one every day,” Julian said. “And best of all, she doesn’t charge.”

  “Mia?”

  “It’s the women who save us from ourselves.”

  Carter smiled. “So now I’m done,” he said. “If you want me to go, I’ll go.”

  And when Julian didn’t say anything, when he made clear through his silence that he didn’t want Carter to go, Carter said, “Stay right there. I just have to tell Sylvie I’ll be a while longer.”

  “She’s here?”

  “We’re going camping in the Berkshires,” Carter said. “We decided to make a trip of it.”

  Carter sprinted across the quad, and when he returned he and Julian walked farther through campus, past the sciences building and Danforth Gym, where they used to play basketball together. Freshman year, between games, Julian would practice his vertical leap in the hope that he could learn to dunk a basketball. He was six foot one, and at eighteen he’d been able to dunk a tennis ball, and he could do no better at twenty-one. Then began the slow process of diminishment. At thirty, with a running start, he could barely touch the rim, and now, at thirty-seven, he couldn’t even do that. He still played pickup a couple of times a week, but he kept spraining his ankle and twisting his knee. Someone seemed to be telling him to hang up his sneakers.

  They stood now inside Thompson Hall, in the room where Professor Chesterfield had held his class. Carter sat down in one of the chairs. He placed his feet on the desk and closed his eyes, mimicking what he’d been like in college.

  On the blackboard Julian wrote, “Thou shalt not confuse a short story with a Rubik’s Cube.”

  “Chesterfield’s commandments,” Carter said.

  “He’s gone,” said Julian.

  “Retired?”

  “Dead. You didn’t hear?”

  Carter shook his head.

  “I spoke to him a couple of months before he died. I was working at a literary agency, and he called to say he’d finished his novel. He wanted us to represent him.”

  “Did you?”

  “The book was terrible. Not the writing itself, which was more than adequate, but the characters. It was as if they’d lived as hermits for the last forty years, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Chesterfield had talent, but the book made me realize that it takes more than talent and it takes more than luck. Sometimes a writer’s personality gets in the way. Chesterfield wasn’t sufficiently self-aware, which I know can be said of all of us, but in his case it tanked his novel.”

  “So you didn’t take him on?”

  Julian shook his head. “What’s worse, my boss made me write the letter. You’d think I would get some perverse pleasure out of that. You know, toppling the father, and I’m a toppling-the-father kind of guy. But it made me sick. I thought my letter was going to kill him, but by the time it got to him he was already gone. He had a heart attack while sitting at his typewriter, at work on his next novel.”

  And now, as if in homage, Carter pointed from chair to chair, naming the students in Professor Chesterfield’s class: Rufus, Astrid, Sue, Cara, Simon, the whole bunch of them.

  “The man was dedicated to his craft,” Julian said. “And he helped me. I’m not sure I’d have continued to write if it weren’t for
his encouragement.”

  “You call what he did encouragement?”

  Julian shrugged. “I guess he was the right fit.” Sitting down next to Carter, he said, “I ran into Astrid yesterday. And Cara came over to say hi to me. She’s still apologizing for that story she wrote.”

  “Twenty-three pages of breaking up with your boyfriend at a pizza joint?”

  “And now a story of hers is being published. So you see? There’s hope for everyone.”

  “Even for you?”

  “You’re asking about my novel?”

  Carter nodded.

  “Are you ready for this? I sold it!”

  “Jesus, Wainwright. And you waited this long to tell me?”

  It was in the midst of everything else that he’d found out about his book, and he immediately fell into a depression. He told Mia and his parents, he told a couple of friends, but they all reacted with more excitement than he felt, so he decided to stop telling people; they would learn about the book when they saw it in the bookstore. It was the lot of the writer, he thought. At least, it was his lot. To feel unrecognized for so long, he didn’t know what to do when someone finally paid attention. Though he had to admit he’d been briefly elated. And, more than that, relieved. At long last, he could think of himself as a writer. As if to prove that, he immediately sat down and began a new novel, which, he swore to himself, wouldn’t take as long as this one had.

  “So tell me the whole story,” Carter said.

  “What’s there to tell? I signed a contract and they gave me some money. Now it’s up to the gods.”

  “Did your boss sell it for you?”

  Julian shook his head. “I signed on with another agent. I was about to quit anyway, and I wanted to be represented by someone who didn’t know me. To have the work speak for itself.”

  “You always were a purist, weren’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  They were outside now, sitting on the steps of Thompson Hall. Dark clouds hung overhead; there was talk of rain.

  “So is this what’s making you middle-aged? Your great success?”

  “There have been other things, too,” Julian said. “Mia’s pregnant.”

  “That’s not good?”

  “It is. But it’s been hard. Mia’s five months in and she’s still feeling sick. She’s back at the dorms now, vomiting, for all I know.”

  Then Julian told Carter about the breast cancer gene. How for a while it had seemed they wouldn’t have a baby and Mia would have her ovaries removed. How she would have a prophylactic double mastectomy as well. “But we decided to wait.”

  “Until after she gives birth?”

  “Probably until she’s done nursing. Though I suppose there’s a chance we’ll try for another child. Who knows? Maybe she won’t do the surgery at all. I tell myself there are a million ways to die. We live in lower Manhattan, the world’s favorite terrorist target. Still, this feels different. I already have dreams that Mia’s dead and I’m taking care of the baby on my own.”

  It started to pour. The rain pummeled campus, to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder. Every few seconds the quad lit up, and now, as people ran for cover, Julian and Carter heard screams from across the field. Julian recalled a summer on Martha’s Vineyard when he got caught in a thunderstorm with his father and how, they later learned, lightning had struck the bench where they’d been sitting just minutes before the storm began. “What about you, Heinz? Don’t tell me all you do is go to therapy.”

  Carter smiled. “I do need to find ways to fill my time.”

  “Have you been living off your wealth?”

  “I did that for a while, but I grew tired of it. I’m good at doing nothing when people want me to do something, but when no one cares what I do I end up becoming bored. So I went to work for the public defender. Which is funny, because that was what Pilar wanted us to do.”

  “Except she didn’t do it herself.”

  “No,” Carter said. “She went for the money. She recently made partner at her law firm.”

  “So you’re in touch with her?”

  Carter nodded. “She’s still in San Francisco. All those years she complained about missing the East Coast, and then she decides she likes California after all. She’s getting married again, to an East Coast transplant just like her. The state is overrun with them.”

  “And what about you?” Julian said. “Are you still at the public defender?”

  Carter shook his head. “I left a couple of years ago.”

  “To do what?”

  “To write fiction,” Carter said sheepishly. “I finished my novel last month.”

  Julian laughed. “How typically nonchalant and savant-ish of you, Heinz. I’ve been working on my book for fifteen years and you churn yours out in no time.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s good.”

  “Oh, it’s good,” Julian said. “I’m sure of it.” He looked up at Carter. “So what other surprises do you have in store for me?”

  “Sylvie,” Carter said.

  “Tell me about her.”

  “You can see for yourself. She’ll be back soon with the kids.”

  “The kids?”

  Carter laughed. “It’s not what you’re thinking. They’re Sylvie’s kids, not mine, though they’ve started to feel like mine as well. Tess and Delphine. They’re thirteen and eleven.”

  “Teenagers?”

  “What can I say? I fell in love with an older woman. Sylvie will be forty in the fall.”

  “And you’re a stepfather?”

  “Not officially, though that will come soon enough. We’re talking about a wedding next summer. Sylvie would like me to adopt the girls, and the sad thing is their father wouldn’t care. He’s your typical deadbeat dad, sees them maybe once every couple of years.”

  The rain had stopped, and now, in the parking lot, Julian met Sylvie and her children. Then they trooped over to the dorms to see Mia.

  They found her watching TV when they arrived, sitting up in bed. “Carter?” she said. “Is that really you?”

  “None other.” Carter took her in a hug.

  “You mean you’re talking to each other?” Mia said.

  Julian smiled. “I guess we are.”

  “And you’re talking to me, too,” Carter said to her.

  Introductions were made, and Carter was saying he wished they could stay for dinner but they needed to pitch tent before dark. “Promise me one thing,” he said. “That it won’t be another six years before we see each other again.”

  “I promise,” Julian said.

  Sylvie said, “Can we get you guys out for a June wedding? How old will the baby be then?”

  “Eight months,” Mia said.

  “Good. At that age, they just sleep through the trip. It’s when they get to be like these two that they start to cause trouble.” She poked Tess and Delphine in the ribs.

  Watching Carter and Sylvie load the kids into the car, Julian thought of senior year, shuttling the group of them from the co-op to class, everyone piling into the Wainwrightmobile. And later, wandering through town, he would see Carter, with Pilar at his back, zipping through the streets on his scooter. “Do you still drive a motorcycle?” he asked.

  “Shhhh,” Carter said. “Sylvie doesn’t want me to corrupt the girls.”

  “It’s too late,” Sylvie said. “He’s corrupted them already.”

  “Though he could be more original.” This was Tess, the thirteen-year-old, from the back of the car.

  “Listen to her,” Carter said. “This is what I’ve signed on for.” He turned on the ignition.

  Julian and Mia waved at them, and they waved back. Then the car was off, kicking up dust, disappearing from the parking lot.

  Up in Montreal, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Mia lit the yahrzeit candle with her father. She had stopped being religious before her mother got sick, but when her mother died she sat shiva for her and during the year of mourning she went to syna
gogue a few times to recite the kaddish. Her father had never remarried. For a couple of years he’d had a girlfriend, Abigail, also a physicist, whom he’d met at a conference in Berlin, but she taught in southern California, where her ex-husband still lived and where her children, already grown, had settled, and she wasn’t inclined to move to Canada. And Mia’s father wasn’t interested in returning to the United States, especially not to California, forever tainted by the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan calling in the National Guard in 1968. You reached a certain age, Mia thought, and it became harder to compromise. Your brain hardened. Or your heart. So his relationship with Abigail consisted of weekends, vacations, academic conferences, and phone calls, and under such circumstances it flared out, cut off in the end by Abigail but without much regret from Mia’s father. There had been a few other women, and a period when he succumbed to the entreaties of his colleagues’ wives to set him up with their friends and coworkers, with their divorced cousins. But the truth was he didn’t like to date. With his focus on work and his irregular hours—he was at his desk at four in the morning, and he would sleep during the day when he didn’t have class—he was suited to stay single.

  Besides, Mia thought, he hadn’t really intended to marry again. He had led her to believe that marrying someone else would have meant betraying her mother. Mia didn’t think so; she’d have liked to see her father remarry. But over the years he’d grown more loyal to her mother. The further away their marriage got, the more it became encased in the hard shell of myth. They had spent all their time together, he told Mia. When he was away at conferences he would call her mother three or four times a day. Mia remembered none of this. Early in their marriage, her father had assumed he’d be the one to die first; in contemplating this, he had also imagined Mia’s mother’s remarrying, and he hadn’t liked the thought of it. By staying loyal to her after her death, he convinced himself she’d have done the same.