Matrimony (20 page)

“Why did you do it?”

Her instinct was to say she didn’t know. And the truth was she didn’t. The betrayal itself, when it came to her, when, as always, she felt conscience-stricken, seemed to have been perpetrated by someone else. For that was how she remembered that year, from the moment her mother was diagnosed right through the funeral, seven quicksilver months when she couldn’t own anything and she felt—there was no other way to put it—inhabited. But in the last few weeks some details had returned to her. A nighttime ride on Carter’s scooter, the wind pummeling them, the feeling that he was taking her somewhere. Carter was going out with Pilar, but his feelings for Pilar, he told Mia, had nothing to do with his feelings for her, and he had a cool, poised logic she couldn’t gainsay. Julian was, in fact, away—she remembered this now—home for the weekend to see some friends. And maybe that was part of it: she resented Julian for abandoning her while her mother was dying. Pilar was away, too. Carter with his persistence and his platitudes—“It doesn’t have to be a big deal”—and he flattered her, sure, but she wasn’t someone who was easily flattered. It was the way Carter made you feel guilty, how he could convince you that you owed him something. “It’s the least you can do.” Had he actually said those words? She had a sudden, glancing vision, Carter in her bedroom, pressing her against the closet where Julian’s shirts hung, for there was a violence to the sex, coming from her as much as from him.

But guilt explained only so much. That spring, feeling helpless, seeing the tight, dour faces of the doctors, she’d watched her mother waste away. “What difference will it make?” Carter said, meaning the sex, and with her mother dying she thought he was right: nothing made a difference. All she could think of was that day with Carter in the co-op kitchen, and his words: “My mother had breast cancer.” Of course he hadn’t told her this before; she’d never been able to get a word out of him. He’d been six at the time; he couldn’t remember much. But she didn’t care; she wanted him to tell her what had happened, for the simple reason that his mother had been cured. That night, when Carter wanted to have sex with her, she thought maybe if she slept with him his luck would rub off. Failing that, she thought he would talk to her. But he didn’t talk to her. He fucked her and he came and he rolled off her and fell asleep. And not knowing what to do, she fell asleep herself, only to wake up disgusted.

She was sitting with Sigrid outside the computing center, and for an instant she thought she saw Julian. But it wasn’t him, just someone else queued up at the printing station. “I have to go,” she said. But she just sat there after Sigrid had departed, staring vacantly ahead, and half an hour passed before she looked up and realized she had to be at the clinic.

Up in Montreal, she found her father at McGill, in the room where he taught his classes. She used to sit in the back of the room while he worked, sometimes even while he was teaching, doing her homework to the sound of chalk pressed against the blackboard, equations blooming across the slate. The day the building was unveiled, she’d been here with her parents for the celebration, and afterward she’d gone upstairs to see her father’s new office, where she looked out the window at campus, holding a glass of champagne she’d drunk too much of, feeling the ground blur beneath her. “It’s my new perch,” her father said, and she felt as if it were hers, too. She’d probably done more homework in Rutherford than anywhere else in the world. She had a memory of an earlier building, of running through the corridors playing tag with her father, only to be scooped up by a stranger who turned out to be the dean of sciences, then being rescued by her father, who said, “It’s all right, Warren, that’s my daughter, Mia.”

She watched her father now from across the room. He wore his signature outfit: the flannel shirt with the collar open, the jacket with the elbows patched. As a boy, he’d had to wear a uniform to school, and he’d done all he could to circumvent the rules, leaving the necktie unknotted, failing to wear the white shirt he was supposed to. It was the kind of transgression that would have gotten a lesser student in trouble. “Are you hungry?”

She nodded.

“Cheeseburgers?”

She smiled. It was her mother who hadn’t permitted junk food in the house, who had read all the food and drink labels and applied the rule that any ingredient she couldn’t pronounce wasn’t to be consumed. So it was left to her father to sneak licorice to her, to buy her cotton candy when her mother wasn’t looking, to allow her when she was ten to eat her favorite snack, SpaghettiOs straight from the can, to take her after school for cheeseburgers, which her mother disapproved of so close to dinner. At twelve and thirteen, when she became religious, she stopped going out for cheeseburgers with her father. She knew he missed this, and she did, too, even if she hadn’t been able to admit it at the time. He had offered to take her to the Jewish delis in town to buy smoked meat, but the food there wasn’t kosher. A couple of times they drove to Hampstead and Côte Saint-Luc to get kosher meat sandwiches, but in the end she felt it wasn’t worth the drive, and it was always a school night, anyway, and she had homework to do.

It had been years now since she’d kept kosher, but she didn’t like cheeseburgers anymore. Perhaps it was a relic from when she’d been religious; she’d lost the taste for them. Still, she was happy to join her father while he ate, glad to be back home visiting him.

In the bottom of a closet, she found an old T-shirt of her mother’s with a name tag sewn inside the collar. When she went to summer camp, she’d been required to have name tags on all her clothes, but she disliked name tags and refused to let her mother sew them on her clothes unless she sewed them on her own clothes, too.

Her father still had his old datebooks, even his old checkbooks, from as long as thirty years ago. Every summer, when they did their big housecleaning, her mother would put those checkbooks aside in the hope that he would finally agree to dispose of them. But he was always returning them to their marked boxes. Her mother had called him a secret sentimentalist, and though Mia had never thought of him that way, she realized now that it was true.

She found a pile of unmarked cassettes. “What are those?”

“They’re what Mom sent me when she was in Greece. We communicated by tape that summer.”

“You were apart?”

“Summer of 1964,” he said. “Mom was doing research.”

“You never told me that.”

“You see?” he said, smiling at her. “And you thought you knew everything.”

She touched the top cassette. Her mother’s voice from thirty-five years ago. She’d have liked to listen to one of those tapes. But they weren’t meant for her, and the longer she stared at them the more she was convinced her mother wasn’t really on them. She could imagine events from before she was born—World War II, the red scare, the Cuban missile crisis—but her parents themselves, going on dates, “courting each other,” as her father liked to say: all that confounded her.

She didn’t want to look at the photo albums—where could she begin?—but there were a few loose photos of her mother as a girl. Mia was astonished by how much she resembled her mother. Babies were said to look like their fathers, evolution’s way of encouraging men to stick around, but she had done things in reverse: she had looked like her mother when she was a baby and now, years later, she resembled her father. The clump of dark curls, the long, narrow face, the cleft like a brand on her chin. Though some people thought her parents looked alike, and she supposed that over time they had started to. “Who’s this?”

Her father smiled. “That’s the guy who tried to break Mom and me up.”

“Another suitor?”

“In a manner of speaking.” On their first date, her father said, he had gone to her mother’s apartment to pick her up. A photograph of a young man hung on the wall above her desk—a boyfriend, Arthur Mendelsohn presumed, and he wondered why she’d consented to go out with him. He almost didn’t ask her out a second time, but he ran into her in the rain in Harvard Square, and because she was just standing there allowing herself to get wet, he assumed she was waiting for him to ask her out again. “What about your boyfriend?” he said. “That photo above your desk?”

“Him?” her mother said. “That’s Paul Klee!”

Apparently, as a young man Paul Klee had cut a striking figure, striking enough almost to have derailed Mia’s parents’ relationship before it even started.

“And you still have that photo?”

Her father shrugged. “I didn’t see fit to throw it out.”

“You’ve kept everything, haven’t you?”

“I suppose I have.”

He was quiet now, and she was, too, the way they often were together. Her mother had done most of the talking; she acted as a go-between for the two of them. “Have you heard from Julian?”

She shook her head. She’d spoken in generalities—there had been problems in the marriage—and it saddened her to talk this way, but she didn’t know how to go about it differently. Her father believed in solutions, or at least in the possibility that there was a solution, and now, as she implied through her silence that there wasn’t one, he seemed not to know what to say.

She bent over to do her laces.

“Look at you,” he said. “Tying your shoelaces with two loops.”

“It’s how you taught me.”

“I did?”

She must have been three, four at most. He’d always been eager to start her early; it had been true with everything. “Two loops were easier,” she explained. She hadn’t had the fine motor skills at that age.

“And now?”

“I guess I’ve gotten used to it.” She recalled an anniversary her parents had celebrated. How old had she been? Five? Six? She’d picked roses from the neighbors’ garden, and when her parents found out where the flowers had come from, they made her apologize to the neighbors. But she’d always suspected they were secretly pleased. They didn’t like the neighbors, a sour, misanthropic couple. Years later, when they moved out, it became a joke that she’d chased them away, that she’d done the whole neighborhood a service.

“Dad, what do you do on yours and Mom’s anniversary?”

“I think about her,” he said.

“I do, too.”

“I know,” he said. “You call every year.”

She was silent.

“It’s the burden of the elder child, isn’t it, to take care of the parents.”

“Oh, Dad, I don’t take care of you. I haven’t even managed to live in the same country.”

“You remember birthdays and anniversaries.”

“Remembering isn’t hard.”

“Maybe not, but Mom and I were eldest children ourselves, and we swore when you were born that we’d do our best not to turn you into a dutiful daughter. And despite our good efforts, look at you.”

“I’m not so dutiful.”

“You’re here.”

She understood he was talking about Olivia. “If it’s any consolation, she doesn’t call me much, either.”

“So I shouldn’t take it personally?”

“No, Dad.”

He got up to prepare dinner. Once, before he was married, he’d heated a can of peas in the oven only to have it explode. He’d been known to live off frankfurters for weeks at a time. He looked thin now, but he always had; she was glad to see he was eating.

He poured them each some wine, and she gazed at him now through her wineglass, the undulating shape of him, her father. On the kitchen counter lay a page of equations. He was busy at work; there was nothing to worry about. Except, she knew, he was worried about her.

Finally, Julian came back for the rest of his belongings. She was standing in the kitchen when he arrived, unsure of what to say. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “You?”

“I’m okay, too.”

She fixed herself a piece of toast, searching for a conversational gambit, and when she couldn’t find one, she wandered into the bedroom and sat down. This was her home. Though really it was
their
home, and now that he’d left, she felt as if none of it belonged to her, as if she’d been squatting for years and the police had been called. “I hear you’re living in Burns Park.”

He nodded.

“Will you be here in the fall?”

“Probably,” he said. “I’ve agreed to teach again, but I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m thinking of taking a trip. Maybe going overseas. I’ve never really traveled before.”

“Of course you’ve traveled. Your parents took you to tons of places.”

“I mean without my parents.”

“What about our honeymoon?” she wanted to say. “And our cross-country trip that summer in college?” He couldn’t leave her, not like this, leave not just her home but the state she lived in, perhaps the very country.

He took out his checkbook to pay the bills. Watching him sign his name, she realized that beyond the heartbreak there were practical concerns, for everything that had been his had been hers, too, and though everything that had been hers had been his as well, he’d had so much more than she had.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “I’m not going to fight you over money.”

Her heart lurched: was he going to ask for a divorce?

Then he was in the closet, methodically taking what was his. Later she would convince herself she’d seen moistness around his eyes, but what struck her at the time was his abject dispassion. She’d expected accusations, a rehashing on a minor scale of what had come before, but what she got instead was a lump for a heart, the rigid cast of his back as, carrying a trash bag like a vagrant, he made his way out the door.

She agreed to go for coffee with a friend of Sigrid’s, an anthropology graduate student who had recently gone through a breakup himself. Sitting across from him, she feared he would talk about his ex-girlfriend and that she would have to reciprocate and talk about Julian. But, to his credit, he was as circumspect as she was. For a moment, she looked at him and thought he was handsome, with a long, sloping face and dark eyes, and she allowed herself to think he was interesting. She could understand why Sigrid had set them up; in other circumstances she might have been attracted to him.