Matrimony (32 page)

And now, as if in homage, Carter pointed from chair to chair, naming the students in Professor Chesterfield’s class: Rufus, Astrid, Sue, Cara, Simon, the whole bunch of them.

“The man was dedicated to his craft,” Julian said. “And he helped me. I’m not sure I’d have continued to write if it weren’t for his encouragement.”

“You call what he did encouragement?”

Julian shrugged. “I guess he was the right fit.” Sitting down next to Carter, he said, “I ran into Astrid yesterday. And Cara came over to say hi to me. She’s still apologizing for that story she wrote.”

“Twenty-three pages of breaking up with your boyfriend at a pizza joint?”

“And now a story of hers is being published. So you see? There’s hope for everyone.”

“Even for you?”

“You’re asking about my novel?”

Carter nodded.

“Are you ready for this? I sold it!”

“Jesus, Wainwright. And you waited this long to tell me?”

It was in the midst of everything else that he’d found out about his book, and he immediately fell into a depression. He told Mia and his parents, he told a couple of friends, but they all reacted with more excitement than he felt, so he decided to stop telling people; they would learn about the book when they saw it in the bookstore. It was the lot of the writer, he thought. At least, it was his lot. To feel unrecognized for so long, he didn’t know what to do when someone finally paid attention. Though he had to admit he’d been briefly elated. And, more than that, relieved. At long last, he could think of himself as a writer. As if to prove that, he immediately sat down and began a new novel, which, he swore to himself, wouldn’t take as long as this one had.

“So tell me the whole story,” Carter said.

“What’s there to tell? I signed a contract and they gave me some money. Now it’s up to the gods.”

“Did your boss sell it for you?”

Julian shook his head. “I signed on with another agent. I was about to quit anyway, and I wanted to be represented by someone who didn’t know me. To have the work speak for itself.”

“You always were a purist, weren’t you?”

“I suppose.”

They were outside now, sitting on the steps of Thompson Hall. Dark clouds hung overhead; there was talk of rain.

“So is this what’s making you middle-aged? Your great success?”

“There have been other things, too,” Julian said. “Mia’s pregnant.”

“That’s not good?”

“It is. But it’s been hard. Mia’s five months in and she’s still feeling sick. She’s back at the dorms now, vomiting, for all I know.”

Then Julian told Carter about the breast cancer gene. How for a while it had seemed they wouldn’t have a baby and Mia would have her ovaries removed. How she would have a prophylactic double mastectomy as well. “But we decided to wait.”

“Until after she gives birth?”

“Probably until she’s done nursing. Though I suppose there’s a chance we’ll try for another child. Who knows? Maybe she won’t do the surgery at all. I tell myself there are a million ways to die. We live in lower Manhattan, the world’s favorite terrorist target. Still, this feels different. I already have dreams that Mia’s dead and I’m taking care of the baby on my own.”

It started to pour. The rain pummeled campus, to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder. Every few seconds the quad lit up, and now, as people ran for cover, Julian and Carter heard screams from across the field. Julian recalled a summer on Martha’s Vineyard when he got caught in a thunderstorm with his father and how, they later learned, lightning had struck the bench where they’d been sitting just minutes before the storm began. “What about you, Heinz? Don’t tell me all you do is go to therapy.”

Carter smiled. “I do need to find ways to fill my time.”

“Have you been living off your wealth?”

“I did that for a while, but I grew tired of it. I’m good at doing nothing when people want me to do something, but when no one cares what I do I end up becoming bored. So I went to work for the public defender. Which is funny, because that was what Pilar wanted us to do.”

“Except she didn’t do it herself.”

“No,” Carter said. “She went for the money. She recently made partner at her law firm.”

“So you’re in touch with her?”

Carter nodded. “She’s still in San Francisco. All those years she complained about missing the East Coast, and then she decides she likes California after all. She’s getting married again, to an East Coast transplant just like her. The state is overrun with them.”

“And what about you?” Julian said. “Are you still at the public defender?”

Carter shook his head. “I left a couple of years ago.”

“To do what?”

“To write fiction,” Carter said sheepishly. “I finished my novel last month.”

Julian laughed. “How typically nonchalant and savant-ish of you, Heinz. I’ve been working on my book for fifteen years and you churn yours out in no time.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s good.”

“Oh, it’s good,” Julian said. “I’m sure of it.” He looked up at Carter. “So what other surprises do you have in store for me?”

“Sylvie,” Carter said.

“Tell me about her.”

“You can see for yourself. She’ll be back soon with the kids.”

“The
kids
?”

Carter laughed. “It’s not what you’re thinking. They’re Sylvie’s kids, not mine, though they’ve started to feel like mine as well. Tess and Delphine. They’re thirteen and eleven.”

“Teenagers?”

“What can I say? I fell in love with an older woman. Sylvie will be forty in the fall.”

“And you’re a stepfather?”

“Not officially, though that will come soon enough. We’re talking about a wedding next summer. Sylvie would like me to adopt the girls, and the sad thing is their father wouldn’t care. He’s your typical deadbeat dad, sees them maybe once every couple of years.”

The rain had stopped, and now, in the parking lot, Julian met Sylvie and her children. Then they trooped over to the dorms to see Mia.

They found her watching TV when they arrived, sitting up in bed. “Carter?” she said. “Is that really you?”

“None other.” Carter took her in a hug.

“You mean you’re talking to each other?” Mia said.

Julian smiled. “I guess we are.”

“And you’re talking to me, too,” Carter said to her.

Introductions were made, and Carter was saying he wished they could stay for dinner but they needed to pitch tent before dark. “Promise me one thing,” he said. “That it won’t be another six years before we see each other again.”

“I promise,” Julian said.

Sylvie said, “Can we get you guys out for a June wedding? How old will the baby be then?”

“Eight months,” Mia said.

“Good. At that age, they just sleep through the trip. It’s when they get to be like these two that they start to cause trouble.” She poked Tess and Delphine in the ribs.

Watching Carter and Sylvie load the kids into the car, Julian thought of senior year, shuttling the group of them from the co-op to class, everyone piling into the Wainwrightmobile. And later, wandering through town, he would see Carter, with Pilar at his back, zipping through the streets on his scooter. “Do you still drive a motorcycle?” he asked.

“Shhhh,” Carter said. “Sylvie doesn’t want me to corrupt the girls.”

“It’s too late,” Sylvie said. “He’s corrupted them already.”

“Though he could be more original.” This was Tess, the thirteen-year-old, from the back of the car.

“Listen to her,” Carter said. “This is what I’ve signed on for.” He turned on the ignition.

Julian and Mia waved at them, and they waved back. Then the car was off, kicking up dust, disappearing from the parking lot.

Up in Montreal, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Mia lit the yahrzeit candle with her father. She had stopped being religious before her mother got sick, but when her mother died she sat shiva for her and during the year of mourning she went to synagogue a few times to recite the kaddish. Her father had never remarried. For a couple of years he’d had a girlfriend, Abigail, also a physicist, whom he’d met at a conference in Berlin, but she taught in southern California, where her ex-husband still lived and where her children, already grown, had settled, and she wasn’t inclined to move to Canada. And Mia’s father wasn’t interested in returning to the United States, especially not to California, forever tainted by the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan calling in the National Guard in 1968. You reached a certain age, Mia thought, and it became harder to compromise. Your brain hardened. Or your heart. So his relationship with Abigail consisted of weekends, vacations, academic conferences, and phone calls, and under such circumstances it flared out, cut off in the end by Abigail but without much regret from Mia’s father. There had been a few other women, and a period when he succumbed to the entreaties of his colleagues’ wives to set him up with their friends and coworkers, with their divorced cousins. But the truth was he didn’t like to date. With his focus on work and his irregular hours—he was at his desk at four in the morning, and he would sleep during the day when he didn’t have class—he was suited to stay single.

Besides, Mia thought, he hadn’t really intended to marry again. He had led her to believe that marrying someone else would have meant betraying her mother. Mia didn’t think so; she’d have liked to see her father remarry. But over the years he’d grown more loyal to her mother. The further away their marriage got, the more it became encased in the hard shell of myth. They had spent all their time together, he told Mia. When he was away at conferences he would call her mother three or four times a day. Mia remembered none of this. Early in their marriage, her father had assumed he’d be the one to die first; in contemplating this, he had also imagined Mia’s mother’s remarrying, and he hadn’t liked the thought of it. By staying loyal to her after her death, he convinced himself she’d have done the same.

Forty years ago now, her mother had moved with her father to Montreal, had done what was expected of her, following her husband without complaint or regret, though she, too, had been a graduate student at Harvard. When she left Cambridge, she forgot her dissertation in her apartment and had to have it mailed to her by the new tenants. Although she said she would work on it in Montreal, she never did, leaving it in a drawer for the next twenty-five years and settling into the life of a faculty spouse. After she died, Mia’s father took her dissertation out of the drawer, and though it was only half finished, he had it bound. Six months after her death, her voice remained on the answering machine because he refused to erase it until, creeped out by the sound and by the idea that she was still in the house pretending to be alive, Mia convinced him to tape a new message, though not before he had removed the old tape and placed it in a shoe box for safekeeping.

Now, when Mia visited, her father would take out the old family photographs, and they would promise each other that this year they would place them in albums, because that was what her mother would have done, and every year they forgot to do it, or decided not to, as if hoping she might come back and do it herself.

In many ways, he was a better father now than when she was a girl. Children confounded him; he didn’t know how to treat them except as small adults. When Mia was four, he bought her an abacus and attempted to teach her the multiplication tables. He’d even tried to teach her to stand, holding her up when she was just six months old and slowly, gently letting go. “Balance,” he said. “Come on, sweetie, balance.”

His papers were still spread throughout the house. His work was in string theory, which, from the little Mia understood of it, held that matter was composed of strings so tiny they made atoms look like monstrosities. At her request, he’d given her a popular book on string theory—“string theory for poets,” he called it—but even that she didn’t understand, so she gave up and asked Julian to read it for her, but he didn’t have any better luck with it. When her father was young he’d shown great promise; there had been talk of a Nobel Prize. But his research hadn’t produced the results he’d hoped for. With physics, if you didn’t break ground by the time you were thirty-five you were considered washed up; it was like being a ballerina, or a professional athlete. Another person might have become bitter but, if anything, he’d grown more even-tempered over the years, and more forgiving, too, as if his own failures had awakened him to those of others. He’d recently described a colleague as kind, and he’d meant it as a compliment. “Kind,” “nice,” “pleasant,” “friendly”: these had always been terms of disparagement in his eyes, but now that he was getting older, he joked that he’d gone soft. And he had. If not soft, exactly, then softer.

His books were strewn about the living room in what he liked to call constructive disorder. The whole house was in disorder, but he preferred it that way. This was another advantage of living alone: no one cared how you kept your possessions. He had a long-standing habit of leaving half-filled drinking glasses about the house, but whereas Mia had once taken this as an invitation to her mother to clean up after him, now she understood it as something else. He didn’t care whether the glasses were cleared. Like a bachelor, which was, she had to admit, what he’d been for fifteen years now, he let the dishes collect until no clean ones remained and then he embarked on a single burst of dishwashing. Things took care of themselves that way.

He rested his hands on the grand piano. “Do you remember your lessons?”

She did.

“You were good.”

She laughed. “Dad, I was terrible.”

“Maybe you gave up too soon.”

She didn’t think so. Her piano teacher, Mr. Clendennon, had made her memorize scales. Piano should be like finger painting, she’d thought then; children should be allowed to enjoy themselves. She still felt that way. She’d never understood the rush to seriousness; there was time for that when you got older.

But her father disagreed. He believed everything you did you should do seriously.

“The first time I met Julian he asked whether I was related to Felix Mendelssohn. I think he was hoping for a famous girlfriend.”