Matrimony (11 page)

“Your mother hasn’t died,” Julian said.

“I know that.”

“What would she say if she knew you were doing this?”

“I want to prepare myself.”

“By pretending? Do you talk at these meetings? Do you actually say your mother has died?”

“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“But do you?”

She didn’t answer him.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because it’s the only cancer support group I know of. Find me a support group for people whose mothers have breast cancer and who are supposed to pretend they’re going to college, and
fine,
I’ll go to that one.”

“You’re spying on other people’s pain.”

“Jesus Christ, Julian, going to these things makes me feel better. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Of course it does.”

“Well?”

She let him take her back to their room and put her into bed, but he found her an hour later walking down Main Street in the rain, without a raincoat or an umbrella, her shoes waterlogged, mud coating her ankles. Holding his raincoat above her head, he guided her back to their room and into a warm set of clothes. He made her a cup of tea and placed her damp and mumbling into their bed where; still wet himself, he ran a towel across her body.

Now, more and more, people gave her a wide berth, even her friends, who, not knowing what to say, chose not to say anything.

“Pilar’s awful,” she told Julian. “The way she stares at me, it’s as if I threw up on her tennis whites.”

“Her intentions are good.”

“Well, the road to hell…”

She found Carter one night alone in the co-op kitchen, warming up food in the microwave.

“You want some ravioli?”

She shook her head.

“They’re Chef Boyardee.”

“Is that supposed to be an inducement?”

Carter shrugged.

“I’m not hungry,” she explained.

“In general?”

“No.”

“A person has to eat.”

Now Carter was doing the dishes. Mia watched the movement of his shoulder blades as he worked the sponge, the pumping up and down of his clavicle.

“My mother had breast cancer,” he said.

“She what?”

He was silent.

“You never told me that.”

He was scrubbing pans and pots that were already clean, doing his best, it was clear, to seem occupied.

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

“I mean about
your
mother.”

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you. I was six when she was diagnosed, and they cured her. I barely even remember it.”

“You’re so fucking laconic, aren’t you, Carter?”

“It’s probably encoded in my DNA.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“That we’re genetically programmed?”

“Oh, forget it,” she said. She didn’t want to have a debate right now about nature versus nurture.

“We think about you a lot,” Carter said. “Both me and Pilar.”

“Pilar,” Mia snorted.

“She’s terrible with illness,” Carter said. “Her appendix burst when she was a kid and she spent two weeks in the hospital. When people are sick she gets the heebie-jeebies. You should see what she’s like when I have the flu.”

“My mother doesn’t have the flu,” Mia said evenly.

Carter looked at her as if to say, “Exactly.”

What, Mia wondered, did Carter want her to say? That she forgave him and Pilar their discomfort? She felt suddenly that they weren’t her friends, that despite all the time they’d spent together, they’d never really cared about her. She wished she were at a big university, but here at Graymont everyone knew her, and when she entered a classroom she could hear the whispers, could see people averting their eyes.

Carter had cut his hair short, and as he leaned against the refrigerator the back of his head reflected off the metal. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do…” He reached out to hug her. But his arms felt limp around her, and now, stepping away, he shrugged apologetically. “You take care of yourself, Mia.” Then he was out the door and into the garden.

Over spring break, home in Montreal, she sat down, finally, with her mother’s doctor. “Your mother doesn’t have much longer,” he said.

Still, his words didn’t shake her, not until her father said them, too, her father who knew nothing compared with the doctors but upon whose resolve she had come to depend. From the start, he had insisted that statistics didn’t matter, the stage of cancer didn’t matter, what the doctors said didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he didn’t believe his wife was going to die. Mia had never seen him cry before, and now, seeing him cry at last, she realized her mother would die soon.

She turned her mother’s hospital room into a shrine. She unplugged the lamps and lit candles and incense and put on tapes of Native American oboe music and covered the walls with photos of the family. She scoured her parents’ cabinets for the vases she’d made for her mother as a girl and brought them to the hospital and put flowers in them. Then she lay in bed with her mother and read poems to her.

“Come back soon, sweetie.”

“I will.”

“Promise me something.”

“What?”

“Swear to me you’ll take care of Olivia. You’re stronger than she is. You’ll be all right.”

“What about me?” Mia wanted to say. “Who’s going to take care of me?”

Back on campus she ran into Pilar, who wore a look of such carefully wrought compassion it was as if she’d painted it on. In anthropology class, Mia’s professor had said they lived in a death-denying culture, for sickness had been banished to the silent confines of the hospital, whereas in other cultures it was less feared. That, Mia thought, was what Pilar should do. She needed to immerse herself in death so as to overcome her fear of it. Though Mia realized she needed to do that, too.

“I’m so sorry,” Pilar said, but before Mia could respond, the words came spooling out of Pilar: at least Mia was getting the chance to tell her mother goodbye.

“Tell her goodbye?” Mia said. “Do you think that’s what I want to do?”

“I mean…”

“Just stop, Pilar. Please.”

Someone else had said the opposite (“At least you don’t have to see your mother suffer for too long”), and Mia said to Julian, “If another person starts a sentence with the words ‘At least,’ I’m going to throttle them.”

“Ignore Pilar,” Julian said. “She doesn’t know what to say.”

Mia lay down and took a nap, and when she awoke she said, “Come with me.” She led Julian out of the co-op and over to campus. They entered a dormitory and went down to the basement, where she held open the door to the laundry room.

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you remember?” she said. “This is where we met. Spring of freshman year.”

He nodded.

“Julian, I want us to get married.”

He didn’t respond.

“I thought you loved me.”

“You know I do.”

“And we were going to get married eventually.”

He’d assumed this himself—he’d allowed himself to hope for it—but neither of them had brought the subject up.

“I don’t know how much longer my mother will live. I so want her to be there.”

And the idea bloomed in him that she was right. They would get married on campus after they graduated. They would celebrate with their families while her mother was still alive.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Battened down
in his bulky winter coat, a backpack slung over his shoulder, Julian trudged through the snow amid the throng of students heading south on State Street. He and Mia lived in Kerrytown, the graduate student ghetto, but not being a graduate student himself, he felt a vague contempt for his neighbors, for the person he might have been had he become a graduate student. Many of Mia’s classmates lived in Kerrytown, a constellation of them arrayed over a few square blocks, between Ingalls to the east and, to the west, Detroit Street, where Zingerman’s Deli stood and where you could see the workers at six in the morning preparing food for Ann Arbor’s early risers.

The neighborhood extended south, where Julian was headed now, bent forward like a pugilist, taking on the weather. The wind blew hard against his face; he was late to meet Mia for lunch. He passed the student co-op and the rows of squat apartment buildings and wood-frame houses. A “For Rent” sign was covered with snow, the name of a local realtor obscured, and in the distance, on the corner of Washington Street, the diner, Olga’s, stood boarded up, though all the other storefronts were occupied. Beyond Olga’s lay Park Avenue Deli and Stucchi’s and the university apparel store and a cluster of coffee shops—Gratzi, Caribou Coffee, Espresso Royale, Amer’s—each seeming to have spawned the next.

Farther up State Street, the undergraduates could be seen in swarms, standing in their fraternity and sorority sweatshirts, the boys in backward baseball caps, the girls sipping Diet Cokes in Einstein’s Bagels, everyone along North University on this Monday after a football Saturday dressed in maize and blue. Julian himself, four years removed from college, had become a devotee of Michigan sports. A lifelong sports fan—one of his earliest memories was of the Mets’ trip to the playoffs in 1973, the improbable victory over Cincinnati, the brawl between Pete Rose and Buddy Harrelson, before the heartbreaking loss to the A’s—Julian had taken a break from spectator sports at college. There were no intercollegiate teams at Graymont, just club athletics, the level low enough that Julian himself had been the starting shooting guard on the Graymont club basketball team, whose games, he liked to say only half jokingly, involved playing but not keeping score. Now, having landed at a Big Ten university, if only as a spouse, he was reliving the college sports life he’d never had. In the fall of 1991, when he and Mia had arrived in Ann Arbor, there had also arrived five eighteen-year-olds—the Fab Five, they would soon be called—who would take the Michigan basketball team on a trip to the NCAA tournament finals, and then do it again their sophomore year. Now three of them had turned professional, but their mystique still hovered over campus, and Julian, who had never seen these players off the basketball court—this was another difference between the University of Michigan and Graymont: at Michigan, athletes rarely went to class—nonetheless had come to think of their arrival as coincident with his own, as if the six of them had decided to attend Michigan together.

But today he stayed clear of North University, avoided State Street entirely as it became more commercial, and cut up east on Huron. He turned past Rackham with wistfulness and regret, for it was at Rackham, in the reading room on the second floor, that he went in the evenings to write, and his writing wasn’t going well.

He was working on a novel, and the book was spinning away from him, doing things he hadn’t been prepared for. It was becoming bigger than he’d intended, but in the process, paradoxically, it was also becoming smaller, a bramble of sentences with no clear direction, time moving forward with insufficient purpose. The day they graduated from college, he and Carter had been awarded Graymont’s creative writing prize, along with a check for a thousand dollars each, and though Julian understood that the world was littered with creative writing prizes, enough people had told him he was good that he had come, tentatively, to believe it. But the praise didn’t buoy him; if anything, it left him dispirited. On graduation day, Professor Chesterfield had said, “I expect great things from you, Wainwright,” and Julian already felt, moments after graduating from college, that he was letting people down.

“I make no promises,” he had said. But the truth was he’d made a promise to himself, to have a publishable novel by the time he turned twenty-five. He’d told no one this except for Mia, and now, at twenty-six, no closer to that goal than he’d been at twenty-two, he wished he hadn’t told her, either, for it seemed to him that the very act of setting this goal, of believing he could publish a novel so young, was proof that he wasn’t a real writer. He believed he would improve as he got older, but other times he wasn’t so sure. He saw himself at thirty-five, forty-five, fifty-five, not knowing how to do it any better. It was a mystery, he suspected, what distinguished those who made it from those who didn’t, and he feared he was missing that essential something. This was what drove him to work harder, was, in fact, the reason he’d left the apartment late today, for as the morning had waned, he’d felt a small breakthrough coming on. But the breakthrough hadn’t come, and now he was late to meet Mia.

They were supposed to have lunch on the other side of campus; he would have to sprint to get there on time. But he didn’t want to sprint in the cold, his backpack thumping against him. He was feeling prickly, besides, because this morning Mia had told him not to be late and had reminded him of her busy schedule.

“I have a busy schedule, too.”

But Mia didn’t say anything, and he knew what that silence meant, and he resented it.

Two teenagers in down coats were pelting each other with snow; each had an arsenal of a dozen snowballs at his feet. One of the boys was protected by a tree, but the other had ducked behind Julian and was using him as a human shield.

Now Julian was at the entryway to the Michigan League, where, standing sentinel in front, was a snowman so precisely rendered it looked more like sculpture than like snow. On its head was a University of Michigan hat; oversized sunglasses were perched on its nose.

Julian headed down the long corridor of the Michigan League, passing notices for dance performances and chamber music concerts. The Glee Club was performing on Friday night. When his parents had visited, he and Mia had taken them to the Michigan League to see Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible,
and during intermission his father had said that
The Crucible
was the most frequently performed play in America and that for every performance Arthur Miller received a royalty check. But what Julian heard his father saying was that he should write something like
The Crucible,
that if he was going to be a writer he might as well make some money at it. Julian, fuming, considered telling his father that he was making art, not selling widgets. But even as he thought this, he knew it was possible his father was saying nothing of the sort, that he was simply making an idle comment about Arthur Miller.

He was on campus now, crossing the Diag. Ahead of him lay East University, Church Street, Forest Avenue, and Washtenaw; to the south were Monroe, then Hill and Packard. He knew all the street names in town, even the obscure ones, the little cul-de-sacs where he rarely had reason to go, for when he and Mia first moved here he’d walked purposefully through town memorizing the street names. He was compensating, he understood, for he was hamstrung when it came to sense of direction. Yet he continued to have faith in himself. He and Mia would be invited to someone’s house for dinner, and he would convince her to follow him down the wrong street, the two of them getting lost on Ann Arbor’s Old West Side.

Unwarranted confidence, Mia liked to say, was a quintessentially male attribute. She was T.A.-ing this semester for the abnormal psychology course, and she found the girls smarter than the boys. Yet the girls talked less, and when they did their voices rose at the end of their sentences so that they appeared to be asking questions even when they weren’t. The boys, on the other hand, were transported on the billows of their own bluster. One, in particular, a young man from suburban Detroit, spoke with such authority about assignments he hadn’t read that Mia had to remind herself that he hadn’t in fact read them.

Yes, Mia thought, when Julian wasn’t leading her somewhere she didn’t wish to go, his errant internal compass had its charms, and she would have been more forgiving if it didn’t come attached to a corresponding disregard for time. Julian would agree to meet her for coffee at two but wouldn’t show up until two-fifteen. He said he had a dialectical approach to time, which sounded to Mia like rudeness masquerading as Marxism. The answer, she decided, was to start without him. So now, when Julian arrived for lunch, he found her at a table, her hot dog and a basket of waffle fries already in front of her.

“Did you give my seat away?”

“I tried.”

“No takers?”

“Come here,” she said. “Kiss me.”

Mia’s dark hair hung in front of her face, and as Julian brushed back her curls, the word “schoolgirl” came to him, which, technically, he supposed she was, though she was twenty-five and had already earned her master’s degree. Her mouth tasted of mustard and relish. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She gave him a look of exaggerated admonishment. “I told you I was in a rush.”

“You have to be at the clinic?”

She nodded.

He dropped
The Michigan Daily
onto the table, open to the classifieds. “Someone’s selling tickets to Friday night’s game.”

“Go Blue,” she said. This was the University of Michigan chant, and what it lacked in imagination it made up for in brevity. When Mia had gotten into graduate school, her father had bought her a University of Michigan sweatshirt, and though she’d never been one for school spirit, she had worn the sweatshirt when she visited home so her father wouldn’t think she’d left it in mothballs. Walking around Montreal, she must have been accosted half a dozen times by strangers shouting “Go Blue!” at her. She’d forgotten: there were more alumni of the University of Michigan than of practically any other university in the United States. She and Julian had been to a few Michigan football games, but once November came and the temperature dropped, it was oppressive to sit for three hours in the cold, and they both enjoyed wandering along Main Street on football Saturdays, seeing the town emptied of its inhabitants. She preferred basketball, besides. She had grown up attending hockey games with her father, who could turn a Canadiens game into an educational odyssey. Julian, on the other hand, disapproved of talking during games, and Mia, whose research in psychology focused on children, liked to think of them as toddlers engaged in parallel play, cheering the home team, shouting at the visitors, but never directly engaging one another. She had become a Michigan basketball fan herself. It was she, after all, who had seen Chris Webber (“the fabbest of the Fab Five,” she liked to call him) outside the Brown Jug, a coup, she told Julian, who needed no convincing. During time-outs, she and Julian would discuss what was happening in the game. They would indulge in beer and frozen yogurt and try to answer the trivia questions that appeared on the scoreboard above half-court. Sometimes Julian would supplement them with questions of his own, and Mia would attempt to answer those, too. Julian had asked her to name college teams with nonplural nicknames, and she had come up with the Harvard Crimson, the Stanford Cardinal, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. There were more, Julian said, but when he offered to tell her she refused; she had never been someone to give up easily.

In line now, Julian scanned the lunch options. Red Hot Lovers was an old-fashioned hot dog joint, and what Julian liked best about it was the free condiments. Sauerkraut, Clancy’s Fancy Hot Sauce, sharp mustard, yellow mustard, honey mustard, ketchup, steak sauce, celery salt, relish, barbecue sauce, pickles. Julian had always been a sucker for free food. At the all-you-can-eat sushi place in Northington, he would stuff himself until he got sick, on the grounds that each additional piece of sushi was free. Now, in Ann Arbor, he and Mia would stop at Zingerman’s to taste the scone bits laid out in baskets and the olive oil arrayed in tiny porcelain bowls. In the sandwich line, they would ask for tastes of soup—of the yogurt cucumber, which was Mia’s favorite, and the cream of tomato, which Julian preferred. Julian ventured that they could have subsisted exclusively on Zingerman’s tastings, but they didn’t want to feel like freeloaders. So they usually bought something, a muffin or a sandwich or, more frequently, just a pickle, which for seventy-five cents came twisted in a Baggie. Julian would get a sour pickle and Mia a half-sour one, and when they reached the midway point they would switch.

Julian came back with his bun piled high.

“Is there even a hot dog under there?”

“One day,” he said, “I’m going to order just the condiments.”

“How was your morning?” she asked.

“Shitty.”

“Writing didn’t go well?”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“In the end, it doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you screw up with a patient, the person’s life is at stake. The only damage I do is to imaginary people. And to the principles of good art.”

“Oh, Julian.” Mia wanted to offer him encouragement, but all she could come up with were bromides. She wondered whether he was temperamentally suited to be a writer. Often he would become restless writing at home and he would go to Angell Hall, to the computing center, so he could be in the presence of other people and the clicking of hundreds of keyboards. She’d suggested he meet other writers to discuss ideas, but writing, Julian said, wasn’t about ideas. In the end, there was no one to talk to except the work itself, and even in the midst of Angell Hall he would be overcome by solitude.

Then there was rejection, which Mia understood was the writer’s lot. Julian took rejection harder than most. Or maybe it was she who took his rejections hard; she was very protective of him. Julian would send out his short stories for publication and he would receive them back in his self-addressed stamped envelopes, often with nothing more than a form rejection slip. He sent them to
The Atlantic
and
The New Yorker
as well as to the literary journals, most of which Mia hadn’t even heard of. But these journals received thousands of submissions a year, so that the chances of being published in one were minuscule.