Matrimony (4 page)

Then they were down the elevator and into a cab, which expelled them into the maw of Grand Central Station. Across from the newsstand, the shoeshine men were huddled like supplicants at the businessmen’s feet. Grand Central Station looked resplendent on Christmas Eve, a young woman like a marsupial carrying her baby in a pouch, a man returning home with a baguette from Zaro’s, everyone headed to where the holiday would take them. Julian so wanted to be a part of it all that he sat down in front of a shoeshine man, only to realize he was wearing sneakers. He didn’t care. He would have the shiniest sneakers in all of New York. He gave the shoeshine man a five-dollar tip and he and Carter went back uptown, where late that night, on a friend’s rooftop, they looked down at Manhattan shimmering beneath them. They drank a few beers and were playing cards, and Carter seemed more lighthearted than he’d been all day, for he was tossing bottle caps off the roof, shouting “Merry Christmas!” to the pedestrians seventeen stories below them.

But the next morning, Carter was sullen again.

“What’s wrong, Heinz? Bee in your bonnet?”

“No.”

“Freshman slump? Overcome by ennui?”

At Christmas dinner, Julian’s father, in a jacket and tie, sat at one end of the table, and Julian’s mother, in an evening dress, sat at the other, and Julian and Carter, on opposite sides, sat in the middle. Two candles in silver holders had been placed at the center of the table and Julian’s mother had folded the napkins in such a way that they appeared to be standing and bowing to you. Julian’s mother was lovely, with limpid green eyes and auburn curls, and Julian caught Carter staring at her.

Julian’s father peered at Carter from behind horn-rimmed glasses. He was a robust man with a thick chest and an expression of impenetrability, and his hair, which was black with flecks of gray, looked as if you couldn’t have mussed it up if you’d tried. “How are you enjoying college?” he asked Carter.

“It’s all right.”

“What classes are you taking?”

Carter listed them. “Anthropology, Spanish Two, ‘The Biological Bases of Human Behavior,’ and ‘Fiction Writing.’ That’s how I know Julian,” he said. “From fiction writing class.”

“Do you like writing fiction?”

“It’s okay.”

“Whether he likes it or not,” Julian said, “he’s the star of the class.”

Carter, reddening, stared down at his plate.

“What have you been writing?” Julian’s mother asked.

“Just some short stories,” Carter said, and it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about this.

“Where did you grow up?” Julian’s father asked.

“Sausalito, California,” Carter said. “Just north of San Francisco.”

“And your family still lives there?”

Carter nodded.

“What does your father do?”

“He’s in business.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s a librarian.”

“Tell me about Sausalito,” Julian’s father said, and Carter, holding his fork in the air, a piece of ham impaled on it, appeared not to know what to say. So Julian’s father coaxed him along, asking what the population of Sausalito was and whether there was any local industry, and Carter, who didn’t know the answer to these questions, responded with a mumble and a shrug, as if the fact that he didn’t know the population of Sausalito meant he couldn’t possibly live there.

Later that night, lying in his old bunk bed, Julian said, “I should have warned you about my father. He’s the Grand Inquisitor.”

Carter was quiet.

“Sometimes I wish he’d just cease and desist.”

“I take it you don’t like him,” Carter said.

“Oh, he’s all right,” said Julian. “I love him, I suppose. He’s my father, after all. Not that I see him very often.” Through his bedroom window, Julian could make out the Pepsi-Cola sign on the banks of the East River and, behind it, Queens. He could hear Carter breathing in the bunk bed beneath him.

“I can’t believe you grew up here,” Carter said. “This apartment’s amazing.”

“It’s all right.”

“Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how high the ceilings are? And the moldings? They look like something Michelangelo carved. If I ever have this kind of money, you can be sure I’ll appreciate it.”

“I appreciate it,” Julian said, but Carter was silent, and Julian could tell he didn’t believe him.

Across from him, he could see the coin machine his father had bought him, years ago for his birthday. It separated the coins by denomination; then you arranged them in rolls and took them to the bank. From the start, his father had tried to teach him about finance. He wanted Julian to grow up to be an investment banker, to take over the firm from him.

“Sure, I grew up wealthy,” Julian said, “but my father was at work until midnight and I’d have traded it all if he just came home for dinner a few nights a week.”

“Lots of money, little love?”

“I suppose. It was basically me and my mother and I liked it most of the time. I had a classic Oedipus complex: I wanted to kill my father and marry my mother. But I also had it in reverse, because in a way it was my father I missed most. I wanted us to play sports and card games, do father-and-son kinds of things, but that hardly ever happened. My father wanted me to go to Yale. He was hoping I would be him in miniature, but I wasn’t going to be that, and even if I had, we wouldn’t have spent any more time together.”

“What about your mother?” Carter asked. “Did she want you to go to Yale, too?”

Julian shook his head. “If I’d been a girl she’d have wanted me to go to Wellesley, but as it was I’d have had to go in drag.”

“Your mother’s beautiful,” Carter said.

“I guess.” Julian had heard this before and it made him proud, but also vaguely uncomfortable. He slid out of bed, with Carter following him, and padded down the hallway.

In the kitchen, he took out a cup that said
té
on it. He opened a drawer and removed his old baby bib, which said
bébé
across the front. “My mother’s pretentious,” he said. “She majored in French in college, but that’s no excuse. Do you know what she called the stroller she used to wheel me in? A
poussette.
” He guided Carter into the guest bathroom, where the faucets said “c” for
chaud
and “f” for
froid.
He was the only child in America, he liked to say, who grew up thinking “c” stood for “hot.”

But now, back in bed, he was enveloped by fonder memories, of the school lunches his mother had packed for him, the cucumber and Camembert sandwiches in their Baggies, the Granny Smith apple slices that accompanied them. He thought of the times his parents had traveled, how his mother would write him before she and his father left so he would receive a letter on the day they departed. Every afternoon when they were gone he would wait impatiently for the mail to arrive. He still had the letters his parents had sent him, the blue
par avion
envelopes with the airplane on the outside that he’d unsealed with his father’s gold letter opener.

“My father had a younger brother,” Julian said. “His name was Lowell, and when my father was four and Lowell was three they were playing catch in front of the house and Lowell got killed by a hit-and-run driver. My father never talks about it—I’ve never heard him mention his brother’s name—but it changed him forever. At least that’s what my mother says.”

“Do you doubt it?”

“No,” Julian said. “I’m sure it’s true. It’s just hard for me to imagine my father as a four-year-old.” He leaned over the bed, and from where he was lying, all he could make out was Carter’s face in the dark, the pale oval like a moon. He glanced down the hall to the row of closets, each with a mirror on the outside; if you opened the closet doors and lined the mirrors up you saw yourself replicated many times over. Sometimes even now he would arrange the mirrors that way, half expecting to see his former self reflected back at him instead of the young man he had become.

“I don’t get it,” Carter said. “Why, if you were an only child, did you sleep in a bunk bed?”

“I wanted a sibling,” Julian explained, “and I thought if I got a bunk bed my parents might fill it.” In the dark, he could see the posters on the walls, the newspaper clippings and pennants from the 1970s, the photographs from
Sports Illustrated
of Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Bill Bradley. “Heinz?”

Carter was silent.

“Have you gone to sleep?”

“I was just thinking,” Carter said.

“About what?”

“How I’m staying over at your apartment and I guess we’ve become good friends, but you really know nothing about me.”

“How can you say that?”

“Do you realize how different my parents are from yours?”

“Tell me about them,” Julian said. “Your mother’s a librarian?”

“For elementary school kids,” Carter said dismissively.

“At least it’s books. I can’t remember the last time my father read a novel. My mother probably reads a couple of novels a year, but they’re not the kinds of books you and I would read.”

“My mother shows six-year-olds what a card catalogue is. I wouldn’t romanticize it.” Carter looked up. “Do you think you understand me, Wainwright?”

“I hope I do.”

“Because I’m not sure you ever will.”

“Try me, then.”

So Carter began to speak. He had grown up in Marin County, he explained, where all his classmates were richer than he was. And money was only part of it. His friends’ parents were on the faculty of U.C. Berkeley, they were board members of the San Francisco Ballet, they were partners at Morrison & Foerster and other prominent law firms. It was even worse when he got to prep school. A tenth-grader when the other students had already been there for a year, a scholarship kid, and everything about him said he was from somewhere else. “According to the school brochure, the students came from thirty-seven states and fifteen foreign countries, but everyone I met was from New England, and they looked at me the way they looked at everyone from California. As if we were tarot card readers. A bunch of B actors like Ronald Reagan.”

“Is that why you left prep school?”

Carter shook his head. “In the end I adjusted. It’s always been that way. I suspect I’ll be adjusting for the rest of my life.”

“Yet you went back home.”

“That’s because the more successful I became at prep school, the more I felt like I was betraying my parents. I knew I’d end up hating where I came from. I already hated where I came from, but this was worse. I was becoming haughty.”

“So you returned to California?”

“And for a month my mother didn’t stop crying.”

“Why?”

“Because she wanted me to get the best education possible. I’ll tell you what my childhood was like, Wainwright. Vocabulary quizzes at the dinner table. Summers spent at Johns Hopkins in this program for the gifted. My mother was so committed to saving money for my education that she bought me reversible clothing. She figured she was getting two items for the price of one, but I refused to wear those clothes.”

“And your father?”

“He was off in his own world, attending to one of his get-rich-quick schemes.”

“What does he do?”

“A little of everything.” Carter described his father’s jobs, and these, he said, were just the ones he could recall. He’d been in the Laundromat business, the stationery business, the restaurant business, the liquor-transporting business, the furniture business, the grain-exporting business, and the pasta-making business. Finally, when Carter was in high school, his father settled into running a marginally profitable company called So Much Hot Air that took people for rides in hot air balloons over California’s Mount Tamalpais.

“So Much Hot Air,” Julian said. “I like that. It’s clever.”

“That’s the problem,” Carter said. “My father sits around trying to be clever instead of actually making a living. He dreams about becoming rich. I dream about becoming rich, too, but I’m going to do something about it.”

“So that’s why you’re at to Graymont? To become rich?”

“It’s as good a reason as any.” Carter looked up. “Graymont’s like prep school all over again. But then, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because if the kids at Graymont are rich, you, Wainwright, are the richest of all.” And with that wealth, Carter said, came an indifference to wealth that only the wealthy could afford, a sense of entitlement, and a way of being in the world that was utterly at ease. He might have been good at affecting indifference, but Julian’s indifference came as naturally to him as breath itself.

“So you have me figured out,” Julian said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“You think I’m wrong?”

Lying on his back, Julian watched his shadow move across the ceiling. “I’d like to meet your parents,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come out to visit California.”

“Sure,” Carter said.

But Julian knew it wouldn’t happen; Carter would make sure of it. Carter would no more invite him to California than he would invite him to Neptune.

Carter’s breathing had steadied, and now, when Julian looked down from his bed, he saw Carter with his eyes closed, asleep.

The first real snow of the year fell, and the students came out of the dorms for a snowball fight, freshmen and sophomores against juniors and seniors; but then the teams shifted, alliances were fluid, everyone was friend and foe. Julian pelted people and they pelted him back. Someone had taken Graymont and shaken it up; he felt as if he were living inside a snow globe.

In town, he guided his dogs to where the path had been cleared, so the snow in Northington wouldn’t look like the snow in New York City, all sludge and mud and urine. Now that it had gotten colder, Mary, the Newfoundland, had gone into hibernation. She was consuming less meat, her metabolism had slowed, and Julian, standing in front of Mr. Kang’s grocery, fed the leftover scraps to the other dogs, letting them lick the juice from his fingers.

Mr. Kang’s store was quiet, and soon Mrs. Kang had come outside and was making a snowman in front of the grocery. She had on a down coat and red wool mittens, but her head was uncovered, her hair loose. She put features on the snowman’s face: Brussels sprouts for the eyes, radishes for the ears, a carrot for the nose, and a snow pea for the mouth. Then she went inside to pack vegetables for Julian: a head of cauliflower, arugula, tomatoes on the vine, and purple kale, which he’d never tried before. He said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Kang and headed with his bag of vegetables slung over his shoulder back to campus.