Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  Forty years ago now, her mother had moved with her father to Montreal, had done what was expected of her, following her husband without complaint or regret, though she, too, had been a graduate student at Harvard. When she left Cambridge, she forgot her dissertation in her apartment and had to have it mailed to her by the new tenants. Although she said she would work on it in Montreal, she never did, leaving it in a drawer for the next twenty-five years and settling into the life of a faculty spouse. After she died, Mia’s father took her dissertation out of the drawer, and though it was only half finished, he had it bound. Six months after her death, her voice remained on the answering machine because he refused to erase it until, creeped out by the sound and by the idea that she was still in the house pretending to be alive, Mia convinced him to tape a new message, though not before he had removed the old tape and placed it in a shoe box for safekeeping.

  Now, when Mia visited, her father would take out the old family photographs, and they would promise each other that this year they would place them in albums, because that was what her mother would have done, and every year they forgot to do it, or decided not to, as if hoping she might come back and do it herself.

  In many ways, he was a better father now than when she was a girl. Children confounded him; he didn’t know how to treat them except as small adults. When Mia was four, he bought her an abacus and attempted to teach her the multiplication tables. He’d even tried to teach her to stand, holding her up when she was just six months old and slowly, gently letting go. “Balance,” he said. “Come on, sweetie, balance.”

  His papers were still spread throughout the house. His work was in string theory, which, from the little Mia understood of it, held that matter was composed of strings so tiny they made atoms look like monstrosities. At her request, he’d given her a popular book on string theory—“string theory for poets,” he called it—but even that she didn’t understand, so she gave up and asked Julian to read it for her, but he didn’t have any better luck with it. When her father was young he’d shown great promise; there had been talk of a Nobel Prize. But his research hadn’t produced the results he’d hoped for. With physics, if you didn’t break ground by the time you were thirty-five you were considered washed up; it was like being a ballerina, or a professional athlete. Another person might have become bitter but, if anything, he’d grown more even-tempered over the years, and more forgiving, too, as if his own failures had awakened him to those of others. He’d recently described a colleague as kind, and he’d meant it as a compliment. “Kind,” “nice,” “pleasant,” “friendly”: these had always been terms of disparagement in his eyes, but now that he was getting older, he joked that he’d gone soft. And he had. If not soft, exactly, then softer.

  His books were strewn about the living room in what he liked to call constructive disorder. The whole house was in disorder, but he preferred it that way. This was another advantage of living alone: no one cared how you kept your possessions. He had a long-standing habit of leaving half-filled drinking glasses about the house, but whereas Mia had once taken this as an invitation to her mother to clean up after him, now she understood it as something else. He didn’t care whether the glasses were cleared. Like a bachelor, which was, she had to admit, what he’d been for fifteen years now, he let the dishes collect until no clean ones remained and then he embarked on a single burst of dishwashing. Things took care of themselves that way.

  He rested his hands on the grand piano. “Do you remember your lessons?”

  She did.

  “You were good.”

  She laughed. “Dad, I was terrible.”

  “Maybe you gave up too soon.”

  She didn’t think so. Her piano teacher, Mr. Clendennon, had made her memorize scales. Piano should be like finger painting, she’d thought then; children should be allowed to enjoy themselves. She still felt that way. She’d never understood the rush to seriousness; there was time for that when you got older.

  But her father disagreed. He believed everything you did you should do seriously.

  “The first time I met Julian he asked whether I was related to Felix Mendelssohn. I think he was hoping for a famous girlfriend.”

  Her father laughed.

  “Did you ever play piano, Dad?”

  “No,” he said. “All I was interested in was physics. And when I wasn’t doing that I was watching ice hockey. I was always very focused.”

  “Do you regret that?”

  “It’s who I was,” he said. “Who I am.” He sat down on the piano bench. “Mom used to play.”

  “As a girl?”

  “And when she was older. The last year of her life she started to play again.”

  “Is that why you kept the piano all these years? Because of Mom?”

  “I suppose.” He took out a sheet of music. “You used to sit on it. Remember?”

  She thought she did. It was hard to know what she remembered and what she’d been told so many times she simply believed she remembered it. She used to take the sheet music out of the piano bench and sit on it. No one knew why; she liked to sit on things. When she was a toddler she wanted to sit where the adults sat—she refused to be placed in a booster seat—so her parents put telephone books on a chair and seated her on top of them. At six, she saw Peter Pan, and for a year after that she was Peter Pan, dressed like him, refused to answer to any name besides Peter. She remembered these things, but they came back to her like cumulus clouds, as if she were descending through something she could no longer see. At times it seemed to her that her only clear memories were from the year her mother was sick. Everything before felt like the blueprint for a life she hadn’t lived. She gravitated to people who had lost a parent, drawn instinctively by their grief before she’d even learned of it.

  She and Julian had been on their honeymoon when her mother died. She had wanted to delay the trip, but her mother insisted they go. From Chamonix, from Lyon, from the Loire Valley, she called home every day. She called again from Nice, called her mother’s private number in the hospital room, and when she asked for Joan Mendelsohn the person said, “Who?” That was how she found out her mother was gone. Died the night before and already her room had been given away. She had never forgiven herself for not returning home sooner, for failing to come back to say goodbye.

  “You look beautiful,” her father said.

  She laughed. “Dad, I’m six months pregnant. I’ve never looked less beautiful in my life.” But the truth was she was starting to feel better. She was less a victim of her appetites; she was no longer going to bed at seven at night.

  “We found out it’s a boy,” she told him. The night before the amniocentesis, she hadn’t been able to sleep. She had almost decided not to find out the sex, but the prospect of not knowing seemed worse. When she got the news, she started to cry. She’d prayed for a boy; she’d practically begged for one. Because though a man could develop breast cancer, the odds were so much worse if the baby was a girl.

  She still hadn’t told her father about the gene she carried. She would, eventually, but not until after the baby was born. She wanted him to be a grandfather first, to celebrate without worrying.

  But she had told Olivia. She’d gone to her sister’s apartment, and when she said she’d tested positive, Olivia hugged her and started to cry, frightened for Mia, relieved for herself. Because Olivia had found out, too; after all that, she’d gone in and tested.

  “You’re negative?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “Oh, Olivia.” She had never felt such unbounded relief.

  Later, she said to Julian, “What’s Olivia going to do now? How’s she going to think of herself as the unlucky one?”

  “She’ll find a way.”

  And the following week, Kincaid told Olivia he wouldn’t leave his wife, and Mia was back to consoling her again. It was the role she’d played for as long as she could recall, the role of the older sister, and she suspected she would play it for the rest of their lives, in
to their fifties and sixties if she was lucky enough to get there.

  She stood next to her father in the kitchen, drying the dishes he’d washed. In the living room, the grandfather clock chimed. These were the long days of summer, and the sun hung high overhead.

  “How’s Cooper doing?” her father asked. “Is he ready to be displaced?”

  Who knew what Cooper was ready for? The books she’d read advised her to send a receiving blanket home from the hospital so the dog could get used to the baby’s smell. And to spend time alone with the dog when she first returned. She doubted she’d have the energy for any of that. Cooper would have to manage. Sweet Cooper. The small things came back to her, how he did a little jump when you brought out his food, and then, when he was done eating, how he would return to his bowl, once, twice, three times, four times, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything; he was, she liked to say, an obsessive-compulsive dog. How he watched TV with them, his ears perking up when a fellow canine appeared on a show, and he would run over to the TV and thump his tail against the screen. One time, he kept sliding on his butt across the pavement, and when she took him to the vet, she didn’t know what to put under “Reason for Visit.” Then, on the row above her, she saw another dog with the same condition, for which the owner had written “butt slide.” And two rows above that another dog as well. “Butt slide.” It was an actual medical condition, and when the vet examined Cooper she said, “It’s his anal sacs.”

  “That’s right,” Mia said, as if she’d known this herself and had simply neglected to mention it, as if she’d realized dogs had anal sacs in the first place. Cooper. Julian’s dog. Her dog. Their dog together. The things a person learned to love.

  Out her father’s window, she could see the street-sweeping truck. “There it goes,” she said. “The great garbage Zamboni reshuffling the trash.” At the hockey games her father had taken her to, the Zamboni would move up and down the rink, wiping the ice clean between periods. She’d always looked forward to the Zamboni; it had been her favorite part of the hockey game.

  “I might visit for Thanksgiving,” her father said.

  “You?” she said. The great anti-American? Her father had stopped celebrating Thanksgiving after the Gulf of Tonkin.

  “You could make us a turkey,” he said. “Or we could make one together.”

  The yahrzeit candle burned on the windowsill. It was designed to last twenty-four hours, but it usually burned longer, and she always stayed up with it into the next night, until the wick had extinguished. She had a collection of old yahrzeit glasses, burned-out candle holders she kept in the storage closet, each candle scooped out like a dark and toothless mouth, the contents of some macabre fun house. Six months after her mother died, that winter in Northington the first year of her marriage, she decided on an impulse that she wanted to say kaddish. It was late, and cold outside, and the doors to the local synagogue were shuttered, so Julian drove her in the darkness through the snow, from town to town across Massachusetts, searching for a synagogue service, but they couldn’t find one. In Springfield, she stood outside on the synagogue steps and recited kaddish while Julian held an umbrella over her head. He said kaddish, too, stumbling through the transliterated Hebrew, mourning a woman he’d only just gotten to know but whom, in his own way, he had come to love.

  Now, standing next to her father, Mia watched the yahrzeit candle on the windowsill, the flame flickering across from them.

  Epilogue

  It’s four in the morning, and Julian sits in the living room in the dark, holding the baby on his lap. Mia has been nursing, so when the baby is hungry it’s her turn, and the rest of the time it’s his. When he’s awakened in the middle of the night, Julian will say, “I think the baby’s hungry,” and Mia, still asleep, will murmur, “Come on.” But there’s been no arguing tonight; she fed him less than an hour ago.

  The baby’s five months old, and sometimes he wakes up only once a night, but tonight he’s been up every couple of hours, so they’re up, too. The world can be divided, Julian thinks, between the sleeping and the sleepless; he feels a new alliance with nighttime workers, with insomniacs across the globe.

  He’s been staying at home, relieved by the babysitter a few hours a day so he can write. And Mia’s hours have been good; she has been seeing fewer patients. Julian’s mother takes the baby one day a week, and sometimes Julian’s father comes over after work so Julian and Mia can catch a movie.

  Around the time the baby was born, Julian’s father and his girlfriend broke up. “It was too soon after Mom,” he said, and now, in the wake of becoming grandparents, Julian’s parents have been talking on the phone again. “I think he’s getting ideas,” Mia said, but Julian doesn’t want to hear about it. Now, whenever his mother says she’s spoken to his father, Julian holds his breath. “Tell me it’s about the grandson,” he wants to say, and so far, thankfully, that’s all it’s been.

  The baby has started to cry, so Julian turns on the light and reads to him. Gorillas, horses, monkeys, sheep: he can’t find a children’s book that isn’t littered with them. You would think he and Mia lived on a farm, but were it not for Cooper, the baby’s only experience with animals would be the squirrels in the park and the occasional fugitive rat seen in an alleyway.

  Across from him, on the bookshelf, sit ten copies of his novel. They arrived yesterday from the publisher. The official publication date is next month. And last week Carter called to say his novel is going to be published, too. “A wedding present,” Carter said.

  And, for Julian, a baby gift.

  Not until after he came back to her did he tell Mia the truth: that he’d stopped working on his novel when he left her and hadn’t been able to return to it until he came back. It went to prove that writers didn’t need to be unhappy; in his case, at least, the opposite was true. In college, he and Mia used to laugh at acknowledgments pages, those doddering professors thanking their wives for typing their manuscripts and keeping the kids at bay. Mia’s mother used to say that she’d refused to take a typing course lest she become like the women of her mother’s generation, who, if they worked at all, were consigned to the life of a secretary. Not that Mia has to worry about that. Still, she half prides herself on her clumsiness at the keyboard. She may be a writer’s wife, but she isn’t about to think of herself as one.

  And now, when he looks up, Julian sees her standing across from him. “What are you doing up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I’m overtired.”

  The baby is on his stomach, lying in his diaper with his arms and legs spread out, as if he’s been strip-searched. He’s smiling now, staring up at them.

  “He’s beginning to recognize us,” Mia says. “He’s starting to distinguish between friend and foe.”

  She goes into the kitchen, and when she returns she’s holding a brownie and a can of Reddi-wip. It’s her four-in-the-morning snack. She thought her cravings would be gone, but nursing has brought its own cravings. She sprays some Reddi-Wip onto a plate and takes a spoon to it. “Don’t even start with me.” If she’s going to feast on whipped cream, Julian likes to say, she might as well eat the real stuff, but she prefers her whipped cream in a can.

  She holds her palm out to Julian; she’s showing him the Michigan mitt. And there it is, a dollop of whipped cream at the base of her thumb, where Ann Arbor lies. Her Michigan husband, she still calls him.

  And now, she thinks, Look at us here. She means in New York, of course, with their baby, but also in their home, which she’s still getting used to. Once, when she was a girl, her mother rebuked her for spending five dollars on lunch, and for weeks after that she would stand incapacitated in the deli line, unable to order anything. Her mother would tell her about her own mother, who had reused old dental floss, hanging it over the shower rod to dry. So it shouldn’t surprise her that it’s taken her a while to grow accustomed to her new life, and she hopes Julian won’t begrudge her an occasional moment of guilt.

  Thoug
h she’s making slow progress. Finally, she has dipped into her inheritance. She has opened a college savings plan for the baby, and she has set up a scholarship fund in her mother’s memory, with her and Olivia as the trustees.

  On the coffee table sits a ceramic plate with the baby’s name and birth weight printed on it. Nine pounds, eleven ounces. Labor was hard going, and Dr. Kaplan thought she might have to do a C-section, but she managed to twist the baby’s shoulders around, and out he came. Richard John Wainwright. John after Mia’s mother, Joan, and Richard after Julian’s father, and after his grandfather and great-grandfather before him. It was what Julian himself was supposed to have been named, what he would have been named if his mother hadn’t insisted on naming him Julian.

  Richard is fair-haired and blue-eyed; he looks like neither Julian nor Mia. Mia has joked that they took the wrong baby home, which got Julian sufficiently anxious that he checked their hospital bands to make sure they all matched. Later, looking at photos of Mia as an infant, he saw that she, too, had been fair-haired. And her mother had blue eyes, as does his. All the Richards of the world must have been babies once, but now, in 2006, having a baby named Richard makes Julian feel as if he’s fathered a fifty-year-old. He tried Ritchie for a few weeks, but it sounded too much like a character in a cartoon strip, so he’s taken to calling him Buddy, or Kiddo.

  Dandling his son on his lap, he says, “May he grow up to be a banker.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Whatever makes him happy.”

  “Maybe he’ll be a veterinarian,” she says. “He certainly has taken a liking to Cooper.” The affection is mutual, for when she comes home she finds Cooper licking Richard’s face. Sometimes she and Julian will place Richard on Cooper’s back and Cooper will walk around the living room with a paternal care they haven’t seen him display before. And Richard, laughing, will kick Cooper’s sides. He seems to think Cooper is a horse.