Matrimony (14 page)

“It’s not the snow that I mind,” Mia said. “It’s how gray everything is.” At the clinic, there had been a rash of new patients. Second-semester blues, Mia’s supervisor said. Mia wondered whether it was seasonal affective disorder; she hadn’t seen blue sky in over a week.
Sit under a sun lamp and call me in the morning.
That had been the joke going around the clinic.

“I’m not crazy about the snow, either,” Julian said. Even as a child, he’d looked forward to snow only in the hope, usually dashed, that school would be closed. He treated the snowball fights and the erecting of snowmen and the sledding in Central Park as ways to make the best of a bad situation, and he would think of swimming pools and the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, of the summer months that lay ahead.

Even now, sometimes, he wondered whether he should have followed Carter to California; he was made for the weather on the West Coast. But Mia hadn’t wanted to move to California, and for Julian, too, California seemed alien and far away. Besides, Carter acted so superior about California. He would send Julian postcards on the front of which appeared the sunset over Half Moon Bay, or whales at Point Reyes, or the coastal highway winding past Big Sur, and he would sign off, “From the land of volleyball and Golden Retrievers, where the weather comes just as you order it.” The more Carter effused about California, the less appealing the state became to Julian, though days like today, with the wind-chill factor near zero, were enough to make him wonder.

He was down the hill from his and Mia’s apartment, picking up food for a dinner party. Mia’s friend Sigrid had passed her comprehensive exams and a group of them was celebrating.

Sigrid had an air of composure—a good quality, Julian believed, in a budding psychologist, and in human beings in general. It made sense, he thought, that Sigrid had taken her comprehensives first. In a way, her passing her comps was a celebration for the whole class, because it now seemed possible that they would pass, too.

The exams were an unsparing, day-long ordeal, with an oral and a written component. Going before the firing squad, Mia called it; her own execution was just a few months away. She’d been spending every night in the graduate library and, when that closed, moving next door to the undergraduate library before coming home exhausted at one in the morning. She was drawing perilously close to the all-nighter, an experience she thought she had left behind at college.

There was something about movement, Julian believed, that prompted the creative juices to flow, for he found inspiration when he was driving or running or merely taking a stroll through the Arboretum. Cooking had the same effect; maybe one kind of creativity begat the other. Growing up, he’d never been much of a chef, but he’d begun to cook when he got to Ann Arbor. Mia would come home to find him with flour across his face and herbs from the windowsill lined up in glasses, Julian with baking soda in one hand and baking powder in the other, unsure what the difference was. He appeared unable to distinguish between a garlic clove and a garlic bulb, because one time Mia found him peeling clove after clove of garlic—the recipe had called for three cloves but Julian was peeling three bulbs—and he suspected his error only once he saw the recipe was supposed to take an hour and he’d spent an hour just peeling the garlic.

Another time, Mia found him in the kitchen chopping onions, his racquetball goggles clamped over his face. “Cooking as sport?”

“Onion eyes,” he explained. He had tried placing the onions in water, but that hadn’t worked, nor had chewing on bread or chopping the onions next to a flame, which were other methods people had suggested. So he settled on his racquetball goggles. Other implements had already proven versatile, such as his postage scale, which was doing double duty as a food scale, except now his mail had started to smell of cheese.

Sometimes the recipe said “twelve baby carrots or two carrots peeled,” but twelve baby carrots never equaled two carrots peeled, and he’d be lining up the carrots next to one another, trying to guess the right amount. Or “eight ounces of apple.” Was that before you peeled and cored the apples or afterward? He bought a large spice rack, but he didn’t know much about spices, so, without regard for what they were, he moved alphabetically through the supermarket spice section, sweeping jars into his cart like a looter.

Over time, however, his meals had improved, and in the psychology department, at least, he’d gotten a reputation as a good cook. Sigrid and her boyfriend, Ivan, who ordered out for pizza and Indian food more than they cared to admit, had been pleased to learn that Julian would be cooking dinner tonight.

Home now, Mia said, “What do I smell?”

Julian unveiled the food for her: lamb brochettes with North African spices, shiitake mushroom bread pudding, endive salad with warm sherry vinaigrette.

“You’re amazing, you know.”

Julian shrugged. “Any idiot can read a recipe.”

Not this idiot,
she thought. If it weren’t for Julian, she, too, would have been ordering takeout every night.

She was in their bedroom changing clothes when he called out, “Can you set the table?”

In her bra and underwear, she laid out the knives and forks. She put a wineglass at each place setting. Julian stood hovering beside a pot of boiling water. Presently, he stuck his head inside the fridge—to look for something, Mia assumed; or perhaps merely to cool off.

She was pulling a black turtleneck over her head, and she spoke to him through the fabric. “How do I look?”

“Headless.”

“And now?”

“Beautiful.”

To go with the turtleneck, she was wearing a white chiffon skirt. It was a billowy getup and it flounced around her. She didn’t generally dress this way; usually she wore pants and simple tops, sweaters sometimes, a lot of straight lines and angles. But this was a special occasion, and she wanted her attire to announce it as such. She had put on lipstick and eye shadow and was wearing earrings. It felt strange to be dressed up in her own home, where she spent much of her time in sweatpants, often in nothing at all.

She stood in front of the mirror pinning up her hair. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m twenty-seven, and I’m going gray.”

“No, you’re not.”

She picked out a strand and showed it to him. “You see?”

“You look the same as you did the day I met you.”

“Well, that’s not true,” she said darkly.

The guests arrived together, Sigrid and Ivan leading the way, followed by Francine and her boyfriend, Saxton, with Will trailing the pack, holding hands with his girlfriend, Paige.

Will held up a bottle wrapped in felt. “It’s Dom Pérignon,” he announced.

A chorus of admiration rose from the group, and Paige said, “Will blew his whole stipend on it.”

Will shrugged. “How often does a girl get to pass her comps?”

Sigrid was at the center of the room, and the rest of the group orbited around her. She had curly auburn hair and was wearing a cashmere cardigan that was auburn, too. The effect was to make her luminous, as if, having passed her exams, she’d been lit up.

“Let me start with a beer,” she said. “It feels like I haven’t had one in months. It’s as if I’ve been pregnant.”

“Don’t say it,” Francine said. “Passing your comps is like giving birth.”

“More like taking a dump, I’m afraid.”

“You’re next,” Will reminded Mia.

They were sitting in clusters, and the way they held themselves, the ease of conversation, reminded Julian of college. It made him nostalgic for a time when everyone was just dropping by, the cheeseburgers and onion rings eaten on dorm room floors, the hastily organized surprise parties, the years when time unfurled illusorily before them, when there was nothing to do but celebrate one another.

With one hand, Julian took everyone’s coats, and with the other he passed out bottles of beer. “Grad student, grad student, grad student,” he said. “Do they produce anything else here?” Sigrid, Francine, and Will were Mia’s classmates, and their partners were graduate students, too, Paige in anthropology, Saxton and Ivan in comparative literature.

“The imagination gets constricted in this town,” Ivan said. “It’s either grad school or go work for GM.”

Saxton dug into the plate of baked Brie, then passed it around to the others.

“So this is how you know you’re a grad student,” Mia said. “The couch sags so low you can’t get up.”

But soon, with the promise of dinner, they managed to disentangle themselves from the furniture and, starting to get drunk, they deposited themselves around the table, with Sigrid at the head.

“Happy birthday, Sigrid!” someone called out, and buoyant, blithe, and lighthearted, the liquor spreading through them, they joined in a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” though it wasn’t really Sigrid’s birthday.

Julian brought out the salad, and Francine, rising, said, “Can I help?” But Julian declined all offers of assistance. He liked Mia’s classmates, but when the conversation turned to shop, as it often did, when someone referred to something that had happened in class, when a piece of gossip was proffered about one of the professors, he felt, not excluded, exactly, but as if he were hovering on the periphery, looking in through a window at the festivities going on inside. He liked going to parties, but once he and Mia were actually at one it was she who had the better time, for she was more adept at small talk than he was. Friendship—the very idea of it—assailed him. There were people in Ann Arbor he had gotten to know and could, with pleasure, grab a beer with, but there was no one with whom he’d established a true kinship. Most of the people they socialized with were Mia’s fellow graduate students, and though she encouraged him to develop his own relationships with them, when he found himself alone with one of them he realized how much he relied on her to grease the wheels of the friendship.

“Eat,” Sigrid insisted.

So Julian sat down. But then he was up again, bringing out the lamb and the bread pudding and pouring more wine and beer.

Now everyone was talking about the future of clinical psychology.

“What I fear,” Sigrid said, “is that twenty years from now we’ll be looked at no differently from soothsayers and phrenologists.”

“The quick fix,” Will said, bemoaning what they all bemoaned: the growing dominion of psychiatry and medication, the rise of HMOs, behavior modification, short-term therapy.

“Half my students are on Ritalin,” Francine said.

Mia agreed. Medication now functioned as an excuse. People’s computers no longer crashed. If someone didn’t show up to class, if they handed in a paper late, they blamed it on their medication.

Sigrid said, “What are we doing in this discipline?” They’d gone into psychology for various reasons, but at least some of them had chosen the field because by the standards of a Ph.D. it was practical; there was the promise of a job. And there were still jobs, to be sure. But they could see it already, in the academic journals, in the popular press. The battering Freud had taken in
The New York Review of Books,
and barely a letter in his defense. The primacy of the brain over the mind, the focus on neurotransmitters and chemicals, the idea that talk therapy was unscientific and soft, when, Jesus, Will said, the relationship went both ways. Hadn’t anyone read the latest studies? That talk therapy worked and, what was more, that the mind affected the brain, not just the other way around?

The group nodded: Will was preaching to the choir. Yet they felt worn out, and at Michigan, especially, they believed they were victims of a bait-and-switch. The psychology department had been rooted in the analytic tradition, but in the last few years its focus had changed. A couple of graduate students had transferred to more analytic programs, and Francine, who was planning to do analytic training, had for a time contemplated transferring, too. Mia wondered where this left her, for her own inclinations were analytic.

“Soon you’ll be like the comp lit students,” Ivan said. “Unemployed and unemployable. And then you’ll really have to go work for GM.”

“No joke,” said Paige. She was a steward for the graduate student union, and negotiations for a new contract had stalled. In the halls of Rackham and Angell there was talk of a strike.

“Well,” Sigrid said, lowering her glass, “suddenly passing my comps doesn’t seem like such an accomplishment.”

“But it is,” Francine said, and Julian, sensing some celebratory object was needed, brought out the cake. Saxton got up and poured everyone more wine and Ivan reached into his bag and removed a video. Soon the group had migrated across the room, bivouacking themselves on the couch, sprawling across the floor, and Will was saying, “When the night’s over, someone’s going to have to roll me home.”

Then the video came on, fuzzy at first, but soon the picture was in focus, O. J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco, leading the police on his slow-motion chase. The trial had begun, and outside the computing center in Angell Hall the blacks congregated in one area and the whites congregated in another and the whole thing was depressing. But now, with Paige on the recliner drifting off to sleep and Sigrid rising to get more cake, they all seemed to have agreed not to talk about this, and they watched reverentially from the cocoon of Mia’s apartment as O. J. Simpson made his slow drive along the freeway.

“It’s been almost a year,” Ivan said, “and Sigrid still can’t get enough of it.”

Sigrid shrugged. She had a weak spot for the tabloids in the supermarket checkout aisle, and for
People
magazine.

“There are worse sins,” said Will.

Saxton clicked on fast-forward, trying to get the video to adjust, so that the Bronco would go at normal speed.

Francine emerged from the bathroom. “It’s Valentine’s Day!” she reminded them. On the table, the cake lay in half-eaten clumps, the icing smeared like putty across the flatware, and Francine drew a heart in what was left of her cake and licked the icing off her finger.

Finally, the champagne was brought out, but at this point everyone was too drunk to appreciate it.

“Drink the champagne before the beer,” Paige said. “That’s the lesson for the day.”