Matrimony (12 page)

Yet at twenty-six, Julian had already published three short stories in literary journals. “You see?” he said when his first story was published. “I’m not half as bad as you thought I was.”

“Julian! I never said you were bad.” But she hadn’t said he was good, either. Julian had called her the toughest critic he knew; their relationship had been built, he liked to say, on nights out at the movies freshman year, on shared discernment and good taste. But Mia was tired of good taste; she’d grown up in a tyranny of it. The right authors (Tolstoy and Henry James), the right composers (Mozart and Brahms), the right directors (Bergman, Godard, and Fellini).
“De gustibus non est disputandum”:
her father used to quote those words to her, but every statement of his, every gesture, made clear that he didn’t believe they were true, and there was no better proof of this than that he always quoted in Latin. The fact was, there
were
better and worse tastes, and Mia’s mother in her less emphatic way had agreed.

The other thing Mia had learned was never to show your homework to the people you love. Growing up, she’d fought with her father over her term papers (he wanted her to revise, and to do further research), over her interest in the sciences (she had aptitude in physics, but she’d been determined not to display that aptitude), and over the occasional B+ on her report card. Long ago, she’d resolved not to value herself for her work, or to value others for their work, either. Now, in graduate school, she didn’t show Julian her research papers and she didn’t ask to see his fiction. “Aren’t you curious?” he would say, and she said, Yes, of course she was, and she would agree to read something he’d written. But once it was in front of her, she couldn’t concentrate on Julian’s story, fearing her own judgments. In moments of repose, she vacillated between thinking Julian was a good writer and thinking it didn’t matter whether he was a good writer. But sometimes she wondered whether she really believed this. What if he wasn’t a good writer, and what if it did matter? So she was glad he’d decided not to show her his novel. She wanted to like it—she believed she
would
like it—but she thought it best to like it from afar.

“When’s your appointment?” he asked.

“One-thirty.” She had been awarded an internship at the university health clinic and had started to see patients. When her mother got sick Mia had gone into therapy, and although seeing a therapist wasn’t a requirement for graduate school, most of her classmates had been in therapy, and those who hadn’t been were looked at askance by those who had. Becoming a therapist without having been in therapy was like trying to teach swimming without having been in the water. But being a patient took you only so far; now she was in the therapist’s chair, and the only qualifications she had were three years of coursework and a T.A.-ship in the abnormal psychology lecture. She was getting on-the-job training, which made her think of medical school graduates, who started their residencies every July and caused patients to postpone surgery until after the summer. Yet she found she had a knack for the job. She was hardworking and she listened well; she believed she was helping her patients.

“And after that?”

“I’m going to the gym.”

“We could play racquetball.” Julian had been a squash snob when they met—he called racquetball “squash for dummies”—but the year after they graduated Mia convinced him to give racquetball a try, because that was what she had, a racquetball racquet, found in her parents’ attic when she was cleaning up after her mother died. She liked seeing Julian in his goggles. They looked like spacemen, the two of them, playing racquetball together. The court’s walls were white, but dark ball marks pocked the walls, and she and Julian were adding to the mosaic.

In the wake of her mother’s death, she had been too incapacitated to make plans, so she and Julian stayed in Northington. She waitressed three nights a week at an Italian restaurant downtown, and during the day she worked at the Graymont registrar’s office, up the hill from where she and Julian lived. Julian took a bartending course, and soon he was serving drinks to the students whose transcripts she was processing. At home, he put his new skills to use, making cocktails for him and Mia, dropping paper umbrellas he had purloined from the bar into drinks the color of gumballs. He would place his hands behind his back, one drink in each, and say, “Choose a hand,” and the hand Mia picked would hold her drink for the day.

“Quiz me,” he said.

“What’s in a Harvey Wallbanger?”

“One ounce vodka, four ounces orange juice, half an ounce Galliano.”

“And an Alabama Slammer?”

“One ounce sloe gin, one ounce Southern Comfort, three ounces orange juice, one ounce amaretto.”

“Make me something blue,” Mia said, and Julian mixed her a drink he’d never made before, something that, for all she knew, he had contrived at that moment, but it tasted good either way. “What’s that?”

“A Julian Wallbanger.”

The next day he told her was serving her an Alabama Mendelsohn.

“My very own drink.” But it tasted remarkably like a Harvey Wallbanger to her, and when she pressed him, Julian admitted it was a Harvey Wallbanger and he’d simply changed the name.

In bed at night, they read novels to each other, and once, when Mia had the late shift and wasn’t coming home until after he went to sleep, Julian called the restaurant and read to her over the telephone. Mia laughed, pretending she was writing down a take-out order, but when her boss began to stare at her she said she had to go.

Waiting up for her, Julian would flip through the student transcripts she had brought home. He invented a game in which she would read aloud from the students’ application essays and letters of recommendation and he would try to guess their college major. Then she would open
The Northington Free Press
and describe the houses that had been sold, and he would attempt to guess the sale price. A couple of times he got the price right and he thrust his arms in the air and declared himself the real-estate king, as if by guessing the correct price he’d won the house itself.

Then Mia would feel bad because how, she wondered, if her mother had just died, could she be playing games like these? Already there were times when she was happy, when she and Julian would look out the window of their apartment, hearing the quiet vibration of traffic on the street, and she’d be filled with serenity. In bed with Julian as he read to her, or drinking the cocktails he’d mixed, or simply flipping through take-out menus, she’d be overcome not by joy, exactly, but by something quieter than that, a contentment she felt most profoundly when doing something as inconsequential as choosing take-out orders. But this feeling didn’t last long because contentment, she believed, was a betrayal of her mother. She wanted to move on, yet every sign that she’d done so compelled her to turn back.

Now, at Red Hot Lovers, she picked at her French fries, trailing them through a puddle of ketchup. Out the window, a man was shouting into a microphone. A born-again. There was a rotation of them, warning people of impending doom.

Behind the counter, the cook was dropping French fries into sizzling oil. One of the hazards, Mia thought, of having been a waitress was that you could never eat out innocently again. Once, at the restaurant where she’d worked, a fellow waiter had tasted the melted cheese on a customer’s onion soup, and when he handed the soup to the customer, a long filament of cheese ran from the soup bowl to the waiter’s mouth. The man the waiter was serving turned out to be the provost of Graymont, and the next day the waiter was fired. “Poor Ian,” Julian said. “Caught with the provost’s cheese in his mouth.” After that, Julian would pretend he was Ian, and he would serve Mia a salad for dinner and stand with a napkin over his shoulder and a piece of romaine lettuce dangling from his mouth.

Mia gestured in the direction of another table, where two students were eating lunch. “Do you hear their accents?”

Julian smiled at her. It was Mia who was always telling him he was an East Coast snob, the New Yorker who thought there was nowhere but New York. Those initial months in Ann Arbor, that whole first year, in fact, she’d felt obliged to be a Michigan booster, for they had come to Ann Arbor because of her and he’d agreed to the move only reluctantly. Even now, she found herself pointing out how good their life was, as if obliged to defend Michigan’s virtues.

Still, it was hard to get used to those Michigan accents.

“You’re one to talk,” Julian said. He liked to make fun of Mia’s Canadian accent, how she said “Montreal” as if it were spelled “Muntreal.” “Muntreal,” he would say. “Like Muenster cheese.”

Mia looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said. She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth.

It was a sunny December morning, and Julian was seated in Caribou Coffee, holding office hours. His students’ final papers were due next week and he’d made the mistake of having them write first drafts, so he now had to read two papers from everyone, and there were eighteen students in his class.

When someone asked him what he was doing in Ann Arbor, Julian liked to say he was the Merry House Husband. Student spouse, he called himself, for that was how he gained access to the college gym and purchased tickets to Michigan basketball games. But the truth was, he was now an official employee of the University of Michigan; he was teaching a section of English composition and was scheduled to teach another next semester. He should have been grateful, for the rest of the composition instructors were graduate students in English and all he had was a bachelor’s degree. It was official university policy not to allow people like him to teach undergraduates, but official university policy, he discovered, was one thing in February, another thing in August, and when enrollment spiked over the summer the chair of the English department turned to him.

He had been given an office, a cubicle in the basement of Angell Hall, which he shared with the other composition instructors, whose job was to negotiate among themselves who would hold office hours when. But it was dark and cold in the basement of Angell, and Julian wanted to dissociate himself from the university, from the very idea that he was a composition instructor. He believed a writer was supposed “to live,” which in his mind meant “to do manual labor,” to work on a construction crew or on a fishing boat and get up before dawn to write. The problem was, he didn’t have much experience with manual labor and, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t good at it.

Worse, he was a stickler for good grammar and proper syntax and he feared he was well suited for the job. The head of the composition program had been at it for twenty-five years, and whenever Julian saw him in the elevator, his brow etched with fatigue, his right shoulder slightly lower than his left from having carried his briefcase for so many years, he saw a future version of himself.

His first three years in town, Julian had worked at Shaman Drum Bookshop on State Street. At Shaman Drum, he stocked books and tended to the register and, along with a graduate student in art history, helped run the bookstore’s readings series. Down Liberty Street was Borders Books, and during breaks from writing, Julian would check out the “New Fiction” section at Borders, then stop in at Shaman Drum to greet his old coworkers. Standing in front of the W’s, he would picture his own book there; listening to someone read at Shaman Drum, he would imagine himself reading. But no sooner would he do this than he would rebuke himself. Fantasies were for fools, he believed; the only thing that mattered was hard work. Superstitiously, he told himself that the way to succeed was to believe you wouldn’t, that only someone convinced of failure had a chance of success.

At the next table, another composition instructor was meeting a student, and beyond her sat two English graduate students holding novels on their laps. Each department commandeered a café. The English graduate students were at Caribou, the anthropologists at Gratzi, the historians at Espresso Royale. Everyone would remain at their appointed location, and then, after a few months, they would tire of it and, like migratory birds, they’d move on.

It was ten-fifteen, and Trilby, Julian’s favorite student, was late to meet him. This surprised him, for Trilby was generally so punctual he worried something had happened to her.

Then Trilby breezed in, clapping her mittens against each other, tall, august, walking briskly between the tables, removing a wool cap to reveal an unfurling cascade of blond curls, her cheeks pale with little blotches of ruddiness, her eyes the blue of agate. “Julian, I’m so sorry.”

“Dog ate your homework?”

“What if I told you it was the cat?” A number of times, Trilby had regaled Julian with stories about her roommate’s cat, who seemed to function metonymically for Trilby’s roommate herself: high-pitched, sharp-taloned, venomous. Trilby placed her bookbag on the table. “Actually, I was taking care of Helene.”

“Ah,” Julian said, “the roommate.” Then, fearing he’d been insensitive, he said, “Is she all right?”

“She’ll live,” Trilby said.

“Well, that’s a start.”

“I had to take her to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. I’ve never met a person who vomits so much. When it’s not beer, it’s bulimia.”

“My wife’s studying to be a psychologist,” Julian said.

“No offense to your wife, but Helene needs more help than that. If I were her parents, I’d cart her back home to Wisconsin.”

Julian didn’t doubt Trilby was telling the truth. But she was also, he suspected, capable of embellishment; she was a born raconteur. Besides, her account squared too neatly with her own prejudices, so that her roommate—the subsisting on Diet Coke, the passing out at fraternity parties, the waking up with guys she couldn’t recall having met—seemed less like an actual person than a stand-in for everything she disapproved of at college.

Trilby had grown up outside Syracuse (“Every place I’ve lived,” she told Julian once, “it’s been snowy and cold”), with a poet mother (Julian had seen a few of Trilby’s mother’s poems in
The New Yorker
) and a painter father. Her parents had named her Trilby after the character in the Du Maurier novel, which, she told Julian, her friends would have thought was a joke, if only they’d understood it. “No one reads where I come from,” Trilby said, and when Julian, only half kidding, said, “No one reads where I come from, either,” Trilby said, “No, you don’t understand.”