Matrimony (15 page)

Soon Ivan announced that it was one in the morning and he had to teach in a few hours. He led the group into the bedroom where the coats were laid out, and the women kissed and the men gave each other handshakes that evolved into hugs, and Saxton called out, “A dollar for the coat check!” and one by one, as if walking down a receiving line, they handed Julian a dollar.

Now, with everyone departed, Mia leaned over, holding her head. “I thought I’d learned not to drink so much.”

“We learn and we forget,” Julian said.

The guests had helped clear the table, but if anything the dishes were in greater disarray, for they were more spread out now (one had been placed on top of the bookshelf—by Saxton, Mia presumed: he was six four), and a coffee cup, still half full, had landed on the rim of the bathroom sink, directly beneath the toothbrushes.

“We should invest in a dishwasher,” Mia said.

“That would be you.” Julian placed an apron over her head. Ceremoniously, he guided her to the sink.

“I can’t.”

“But you said you’d do the dishes.”

“Done in a moment of weakness.” Mia threw herself onto the couch; the apron hung like a cloak around her. “Have mercy on me, Julian. I have to teach tomorrow.”

“I do, too.”

“And my comps are coming up. You heard what Will said. I’m next.”

“Your comps aren’t for another three months.”

“Every day counts. Just because Sigrid passed doesn’t mean I will.”

But Julian didn’t doubt that she would pass. She was the golden girl of the department. That was what everyone called her, and though she protested, he understood that it was so.

He carried a couple of water glasses into the kitchen, then brushed the crumbs from the counter. When he turned around, Mia was directly in front of him, so close they could have kissed.

“Please?” she said.

“You’re not the only one who’s tired.”

“I understand.”

He drained the wineglasses into the sink, then turned on the disposal. “Every day counts for me, too.”

“I know it does.”

He looked at her levelly. “I’ve already taken up a lot of the slack.”

“And I appreciate it.” She tapped a plate against the lip of the garbage, sending the food toppling in.

Soon, however, she had departed the kitchen, and when he saw her next, she was in her tank top and underwear, getting ready for bed. “If you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t do the dishes now. I’ll get up early tomorrow morning and wash them.”

But now, with Mia in bed, as he sat at the computer trying to write, Julian could feel the dirty dishes piled behind him. If he’d had a study, he could have closed the door and let the dishes lie there, but he and Mia lived in a one-bedroom apartment where the living room and dining room were also the study. Mia would have suggested he go to the computing center, but it was two in the morning and snowing out, and the computing center was fifteen minutes away. When they moved to Ann Arbor, he’d proposed that they rent a larger apartment, but Mia hadn’t wanted to appear rich. So they’d overcompensated, living in sparser quarters than most graduate students did. She’d been overcompensating, too, with her comment tonight—“So this is how you know you’re a grad student. The couch sags so low you can’t get up.” He’d been with her when they’d gotten that couch; they’d bought it used from a departing student, and though he hadn’t objected to doing that, it had seemed to him that she was making a point and he’d had half a mind to tell her to stop slumming.

He turned off the computer and went into the kitchen. It would take him an hour to complete the task, and he seethed as he settled into it, the water scalding his hands, the steel wool abrading him. Oh, for a dishwasher! For a bigger apartment! He let his mind wander to the political, to the fact that Mia’s friends envied her his cooking, the way he helped out at home; if their roles had been reversed, if he’d thrown a party for his friends and Mia had done the cooking and then, because he was tired, she’d been left to clean up, there would have been a noxious aspect to the evening and the guests would have partaken of the meal with quiet disapproval.

When he got into bed, Mia reached out to touch him.

“You’re not asleep,” he said.

“I was for a while.”

“Did I wake you?”

“No.”

The numbers of the alarm clock flipped over, peeling back from themselves like molting skin.

“How did your writing go?”

“It didn’t.” In the dark, he was beginning to make out the edges of her, like a photo floating in fixer.

“Tomorrow will be better,” she said. “It’s what you always say. The bad days are investments in the good ones.”

“I did the dishes,” he said.

“Oh, Julian. You didn’t have to. I said I would do them in the morning.”

“I couldn’t go to bed with the place looking like that.”

She was on top of him now, and he felt a swelling within him. He didn’t want to be angry with her, but he also didn’t feel like having sex. That was a difference between them. When they fought, she saw sex as a way of making up, whereas he saw making up as a prerequisite for sex. Though occasionally he’d succumbed to her entreaties.

“Did you have fun tonight?” he asked.

She nodded. “How about you?”

“It was all right.”

“The food was great,” she said.

“I’m glad.” His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and now his dresser and nightstand appeared before him as if covered in a gray cloak.

“My friends like you a lot,” she said. “It gets tiresome hanging out just with other graduate students.”

He felt it coming on again, that feeling of what-am-I-doing-here? But he knew what he was doing here; he was here because Mia was in graduate school. And the next move would be for him: they’d agreed on that.

“Not that they’d like you any less if you decided to go back to school.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those people would be lucky to have you here.”

“What people?”

“Michigan’s MFA program. You’ve already published some of your stories. They’d be crazy not to take you.”

“But I don’t want to get my MFA. Can’t you understand that? I’ve already been in enough writing workshops.”

“Okay,” she said. “Forget I even mentioned it.”

He went into the bathroom and washed his face. A squirrel had alighted on the windowsill, and another was behind it, leaving prints across the snow. He rearranged the shower curtain. It had a map of the world printed on it, and he and Mia would play a game where they would close their eyes and point to the map and that would be where they would take their next vacation. One time, he spun her around and she pointed to Albania, and since that didn’t seem like the best vacation spot, she went again, only to land on Sudan. Michigan wasn’t marked off on the map, so Julian had marked it off himself, writing “Ann Arbor” in indelible ink and next to it an asterisk with the words “You are here.”

Back in bed, he listened to the radiator beat out its tune, the syncopated rumble like the sound of something scurrying. Above him, his and Mia’s shadows were pressed against the wall, like figures in a cutout.

“I got an offer for next year,” he said. “The department wants me to teach another composition class.”

“Julian! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

She leaned across the covers and kissed him. “Come on,” she said. “Why so glum? Don’t pretend this isn’t great news.”

“I guess it’s better than not being offered it.”

“Which would have been inconceivable, mind you.”

“I only have a bachelor’s degree,” he said. “They could have gone back to the rulebook. Decided protocol was protocol.”

“But you’re better than everyone else.”

“I don’t care if I’m better than everyone else. It’s not what I want to be doing in twenty years.”

“What do you want to be doing in twenty years?”

“Writing,” he said. “I just want to be more successful at it.”

Mia liked to say she could have opened a psychology clinic for the exclusive treatment of Nobel Prize winners. Julian suspected she was right, but he couldn’t help feeling that if he were as good as they were he would really know how to appreciate it. When people asked him why he wrote he told them the truth: he had to. And no matter what Mia said, he thought if he were successful he’d be happy, for there was a sorrow so deep in him he couldn’t excavate it and he believed he could uproot it only with acclaim. And if he went deeper than that, if he tried to excavate the wish itself, he suspected he wrote for his parents. They had always been distracted, his father at work, his mother in an emotional cloud cover he couldn’t penetrate. Perhaps it was the lot of only children, spending so much time in the company of adults, pressed, in his case, into the service of parents who hadn’t managed to give him what he wanted. Or maybe he wanted too much. He’d written for his parents when he was a boy—in a way, he still wrote for them—and the sad thing was that his parents weren’t really interested in fiction, certainly not his father, who in another of his hapless, well-intentioned gestures had secured for him for his sixteenth birthday an inscribed copy of
Atlas Shrugged,
which Julian accepted with perfunctory gratitude, doing his best not to betray what he thought of Ayn Rand. For years he’d told himself he would publish a novel and at long last his parents would celebrate him. Though another memory settled on him, of a breakfast one morning when he was a teenager, his father across from him with
The Wall Street Journal,
Julian announcing that he’d written a short story and his father saying so idly, so inattentively it was possible, Julian realized, he hadn’t really heard him, “I wouldn’t begin to know how to write a short story.” Maybe that was when he’d decided to become a writer.

“I’m not talking about fame,” he told Mia. “Just a measure of success. You must want that, too. A feeling that you’re doing a good job.”

“I just worry you’re setting the bar too high.”

“All I want is to publish my novel. Is that so unreasonable?”

She didn’t think it was. But it concerned her how long it was taking him. She felt as if he were on a ride, and that by being married to him she was on that ride, too, lassoed by his despair. She’d spent her life around artists. There was Olivia, of course. And her mother had painted when she was younger and for a time had thought about going to art school. Now Mia herself was married to an artist, and at a certain point, she believed, persistence became pigheaded; it was just a way of kidding yourself. Julian hadn’t reached that point, but she didn’t know if she would still think so in five years, or ten. She’d been relieved when he started to teach composition. It felt like a real job to her. For a time she’d suggested he go to law school and write on the side. It was what Carter had done; but he’d given up writing entirely.

Now, though, lying next to Julian, Mia resolved not to bring up graduate school again. She felt grateful to him for having come along, for having loved her as long as he had. Thank God she’d found him, because where would she be now if she hadn’t married Julian, if she’d graduated from college and her mother had died and it was just her alone, without anyone?

She made love to him, while outside the sky was lightening; in another hour it would be dawn. When Julian came, he gave a little squeal that delighted her.

Afterward, they lay next to each other on their backs, listening to the sounds of their breathing.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

She didn’t respond.

“Is something wrong?”

She sat up in bed, feeling his toes against hers, the knobby Braille of his ankle. “When Francine mentioned it was Valentine’s Day today, I realized I’d forgotten about it.”

“I did, too.”

“And it’s understandable. We’re both busy, and I know the whole thing’s a creation of Hallmark. But it makes me wonder whether something’s missing.”

“With us?”

“You love me, Julian, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

But she felt unsettled nonetheless. It had been four couples at dinner tonight, but she and Julian were the only ones married. It had been that way from the start, for at first she’d been the lone married member of her graduate class. When she was introduced to her classmates during orientation week, she’d resisted telling them she was married, but eventually they found out and they wanted to know why she’d been hiding it.

And then she wondered whether she
had
been hiding it. When she and Julian arrived in Ann Arbor, it had been only a year since she’d gotten married, but already the wedding was a fog to her. She hadn’t wanted to receive gifts when her mother was dying. She had opened a few of the cards, most of which were offers of condolence as well as congratulations; in their fumbling attempts to express some honest sentiment they made her embarrassed for the card writer, and after reading a few of them she couldn’t go on. Instead of gifts, she and Julian had asked people to donate to a charity in their name, but most of the guests sent gifts anyway, and the few they opened were bowls, which she and Julian arrayed carefully about their apartment in Northington, conscious that they were setting up a home together. But the bowls looked wrong wherever they were placed, so she returned them to the closet with the other unopened gifts. Occasionally they would look inside that closet as if peeking at a life they had chosen not to live, and they would remind each other that they had to write thank-you notes. Finally, Julian wrote eighty-five thank-you notes in a single weekend, though he and Mia still hadn’t opened most of the presents, so he could write only vague thanks for the person’s generosity.

When they moved to Ann Arbor, they finally opened the rest of the gifts, which made Mia feel as if they’d just gotten married and it was permissible, finally, to celebrate. But the gifts meant little to her. There were more bowls and plates, some cookware, a waffle iron, a fondue set, the kinds of things people gave to suggest a new, shared life. But she and Julian had never been fondue- or waffle-eaters and it seemed forced to become them just because they were married. Besides, they had gotten married so long ago it was hard to connect the gift with the event, and so they did what they had done in Northington: they placed the gifts back inside the closet.