Matrimony (7 page)

Finally they fell asleep, and when they awoke the next morning Julian said, “Thomas Jefferson was in my dream last night. He was my student. I was Thomas Jefferson’s professor.”

Mia looked at him dubiously.

“Jefferson came in to complain about his grade. I’d given him a B-plus on the Declaration of Independence.”

“A B-plus!”

“That’s exactly what Julian said. He wanted at least an A-minus.”

“Thomas Jefferson!” Mia said. “You have very arrogant dreams.” She placed her foot behind Julian and pushed him over her leg so he tumbled backward to the floor. As he fell, his legs kicked up and his testicles did, too. “Be careful,” she said. “I was on the wrestling team in high school.”

“You were?”

“Field hockey,” she said. “Close enough.”

“Come,” he said. “Let’s shower.”

She stepped into the stall and raised her face to the water, holding her hair in a fist behind her head. He took her by the shoulders and drew her close to him, feeling the press of her nose against his face.

Afterward, in class, he missed her already and he’d only just seen her. When he saw her again she said she’d missed him, too. She loved everything about him, she said: the tiny dimple on his right elbow, the way his hair was so straight coming down over his forehead, all of it dark brown, almost black except for a little patch of blond above the left ear. “I’m one-two-hundredth albino,” he told her. She loved his toenails, she said, and the way in his sleep he wrapped her hair around his fingers. That was how she liked waking up in the morning, with her hair twirled taut around him.

It went on like this, the weather getting warmer and the afternoons extending into what had been evening, the oak trees in full bloom above the dormitories, casting their shadows across Christ Church. The clocks had been moved forward (
Spring forward,
Julian thought,
fall back
), which pleased him, an extra hour of daylight; he’d have been happy to have Daylight Saving Time all year.

He went with Mia everywhere, even to her classes. He sat in on her sociology seminar and she joined him for his history survey, “Europe from the Inquisition to World War I.” They ate their meals together, and late at night they picked up chili cheese dogs and chili cheese fries from the grill downstairs and fed quarters into the pinball machines and video games, which they pressed up against, hoping to get a little extra English, jabbing their fingers against buttons and joysticks.

Mia gave him a key to her room, and she would find him flipping through her books, trying to discover what she liked to read. “Be careful,” she said. “Someone else might think you’re a voyeur.”

“But you’re not someone else. You’re you.”

One time, she found him in her closet, rustling around. He held up a pair of shoes and clapped them against each other.

“Are you becoming an archaeologist?”

“
Ge
ologist,” he said, showing her a pebble he’d extracted from her shoe.

She had loved him from the start, she said, when after their first night together he met her on the steps of McMillan Library with a Swiss cheese–and–avocado sandwich he’d made for her. How had he known she liked avocado? “Why wouldn’t you?” he said. But had he known that as a girl she had eaten as many avocados as she could in order to plant the pits? She would sing to her avocado plants because they were supposed to grow better that way, but she had such a terrible voice, maybe that was why they hadn’t grown. Had he known that, the singing part?

Yes, he said, he did.

“How?”

“I intuited it.”

“You’re perfect,” she said. She loved the taper of his calves, and the feel of his hair, and the fact that he called his dorm room the Wainwright Hotel and left Peppermint Patties on her pillow.

Julian took Mia to meet Mr. Kang, who was standing where he always was, outside the grocery, like a maître d’.

Mr. Kang shook Mia’s hand, then went to get his wife. Although Julian hadn’t said anything, Mr. Kang seemed to understand who Mia was, and Mrs. Kang seemed to understand as well.

“My wife will get vegetables,” Mr. Kang said, and Mrs. Kang ran off, with Mr. Kang close behind her. Their backs were to them, and all Julian could see was the movement of their hands from the produce bins and back again; it looked as if they were doing exercises.

“They must like you,” Julian said. “They only give free vegetables to people they like.”

“I think it’s
you
they like.”

“If you’re lucky,” he said, “they might throw in some fruit.”

They walked slowly up the hill carrying their shopping bags, and when they turned around they saw Mr. and Mrs. Kang waving at the bottom of the hill, and with their free hands they waved back.

In writing class, Professor Chesterfield said, “What’s with Wainwright? He appears to be in la-la land.”

“Wainwright’s in love,” Carter said.

Professor Chesterfield began to clap. Slowly, singularly, he was applauding Julian. “So, Wainwright, is it true?”

Julian shrugged.

“I’ve been in love,” Professor Chesterfield said.

“You have?” said Rufus.

“There’s no sadder sight in the world,” Professor Chesterfield said, “than a young man who’s fallen in love.”

Carter seemed to agree, for afterward in the dorms he was calling Julian Loverboy, saying, “Well, look who’s walking down the hall, Mr. Wash My Clothes at Every Opportunity.” It was as if Carter thought Julian had contrived to meet Mia in the laundry room, as if he believed cleaning your clothes were compulsive and he’d caught Julian at it.

They would stay up late, Julian, Mia, Carter, and Pilar, eating chips and burgers and playing Hearts, a game Carter loved, and never more so than when he played with Julian and Mia, because he always won.

“Carter goes for the throat,” Pilar said. “You’d think he’d die if he didn’t win.”

“You mean I wouldn’t?” Carter laughed and Pilar did, too, and you could tell Pilar liked this about Carter, his ferocity, and the fact that he won.

Soon they switched to poker, which Carter usually won at as well, though Pilar won a couple of games herself. She jumped up and did a victory dance, and she and Carter ran a lap around the lounge, after which Carter did hurdles over the couch. Then, hand in hand, they departed, humming a tune as they did so.

Soon Julian and Mia left, too, to see horror movies in Pickens Hall—
Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, Carrie, The Exorcist
—which now that finals were approaching were the only movies showing on campus.

“It’s a school of sadists,” Mia said. “Can’t they show a romantic comedy?”

As the movies played, she and Julian fell asleep in the quiet of the auditorium while beyond the walls their classmates were falling asleep, too, in the library, on the sectional couches. The voices on the screen dissipated, incorporating themselves into Julian’s and Mia’s dreams, and soon another movie had started and they began the process all over again, falling asleep with their fists in the popcorn, their fingers trailing through the butter.

They returned to Julian’s dorm and fell asleep for real, and in the morning when he awoke Julian found Mia where he’d left her, sprawled on her stomach, looking beautiful still, the edge of his pillow tucked inside her mouth.

At Graymont,
the longer you’d been at the college the farther away from campus you lived, for housing was laid out in clusters, with the freshmen at the epicenter, in the Commons, and the sophomores in a circle surrounding them, and the juniors set even farther back, most of them in off-campus housing. It was like the rings around Saturn, Julian thought, until, when you were a senior, it was as if you weren’t in orbit any longer and you lived far enough away from school that you made no pretense of going to class.

It was the fall of their senior year and he was living with Mia; in the room next door lived Carter and Pilar. It was a huge house, nominally a co-op, in that there was a shopping rotation and monthly meetings, but the four of them weren’t interested in living cooperatively and had joined because the bedrooms were enormous and out back was a landscaped garden with a hot tub raised in the middle of it. They would stay in the hot tub so long they’d nearly fall asleep, and one time Pilar did in fact fall asleep, listing to the side like a canoe before keeling over and toppling in, only to be rescued, coughing, by Carter.

It was a temperate October night and they were lounging in the tub, the four of them illuminated by lanterns strung from the garden walls. Mia lay on her back in the water, warming herself in an imaginary sun. It was the proper way, she claimed, to say goodbye to college, naked, warm, as if the water itself might transport her to wherever life after college led. “Soon we’ll graduate, and I imagine we’ll have to wear clothes to work. They have dress codes out there, don’t they?”

“It will be a concession,” Julian agreed, “but if I have to wear clothes to get out of this place, so be it.” He wanted to hurl himself into the world, where there were no papers or exams, no professors lecturing him.

“The problem with the real world,” Carter said, “is you have to have a boss.” Carter was determined never to have a boss, but the more resolute he became the less it seemed possible, and thinking about this made him morose and, to his surprise, nostalgic for college. Though at the same time, he said, he was sick of school. He had always been partial to academic shortcuts, but now that he was a senior he was taking evasion to new extremes. He had started to write what he called beyond-the-scope-of-this-paper papers, in which he would begin by listing all the things he wasn’t going to write about. He had already handed in a paper that spent the first seven out of fifteen pages outlining the issues he wouldn’t address, and his goal was to visit on some unsuspecting professor a paper composed entirely of things he wouldn’t address and to receive an A for not having addressed them. “I’m taking pity on my professors,” Carter said. “They probably get bored with the usual stuff.” In sociology class, one of Carter’s classmates had accidentally left his paper lying on his desk, and Carter, seeing that the paper began with the words “Throughout history,” had affixed in the margin: “Throughout history I’ve been reading papers like this one.”

Now, lying in the hot tub, Carter said, “Let’s take a drive.”

“Where to?” said Julian.

“You name it.”

Pilar said, “The world’s our oyster, Carter?”

“I don’t know about the world,” Carter said, “but we can start with western Massachusetts.”

But the four of them remained floating in the water while beyond the garden walls sat Julian’s green Saab, gleaming in the coop’s floodlights. Over the summer, he and Mia had driven the Saab cross-country, up into the Badlands, then west through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, before turning south and heading back. They had intended to buy a used van and drive it until it wouldn’t go any longer, but once Julian’s parents saw the van in question, they handed him the keys to their car. Still, the understanding had been that Julian would return the car at the end of the summer. So he was startled, and delighted, when Labor Day came and it was simply assumed he’d take the Saab up to school. “Squatters’ rights,” he told Mia.

Now, up on campus, Julian had made clear that Carter and Pilar could drive the car as well, and other friends, too, were allowed to borrow it if they needed to run an errand. Julian was rich but he was generous, and he, Mia, Carter, and Pilar could be seen caravaning to campus—“Here comes the Wainwrightmobile!” Carter would call out—depositing themselves in a parking lot near class.

Other times Carter would take his motorized scooter (he’d been home over the summer, working in Oakland, and the scooter had been his reward to himself) and Pilar would hop on and he’d drive her to campus.

Pilar was more cautious than Carter, and she was always telling him to drive carefully, which made him only more headlong. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ve got a hard head.”

“A dense one!” she yelled into his ear, holding on to him as they zipped along the roads, past Main Street and Union and West University.

Later, with the four of them reposing in the hot tub, passing around a hollowed-out apple Carter had fashioned into a bong, Pilar said, “A person can get to class without doing wheelies, don’t you think?”

Julian shrugged beneath the water. “Carter has a reputation to live up to.”

“That’s right,” Carter said. “Evel Knievel goes to anthropology class.”

Pilar made a show of being exasperated. She was tall and thin, with eyes the green of a soldier’s uniform and a fine, delicate nose that seemed always to be pointing somewhere. Her features were constantly moving, she had a high-alert face, and she was beautiful, Julian thought; they all did.

“Eventually, Carter’s going to crash that thing and I’ll end up as some poor college-girl widow. A twenty-one-year-old Jackie O.”

Carter shook his head. “What’s going to happen is we’ll both be dead and the school will have to mourn us together.”

“That’s Carter’s dream,” Julian said. “To have the college flag at half-mast and him in heaven spitting down on everyone.”

Carter said, “It would almost be worth dying just for that.”

“He does have a death wish,” Pilar said.

But later, alone with Julian in their bedroom, Mia said Pilar protested too much. Pilar liked having a boyfriend who drove a scooter, even liked the fact that he drove it helmetless and insisted that she ride helmetless, too. “Carter has this theory,” Mia said, “that the safer the world gets the more we need to find new risks. It’s like we have this allotment, and one way or another we’re going to spend it.” She and Julian were reading in bed, idly glancing up from their books. “The thing about Pilar is, you know how she’s always deferring to Carter, giving him the spotlight? Well, secretly she has a plan for him.”

Julian agreed. Carter had started to dress differently, with fewer holes in his blue jeans, less alligator leather, and now that he’d moved in with Pilar he seemed like a striver, as if suddenly he thought all this could be his.

“When we go out to dinner,” Mia said, “have you noticed how Pilar watches him hold his fork? She’s always saying things like, ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the mallard.’”

Pilar had grown up in Washington, D.C., and in Greenwich, Connecticut, where everyone wore white on the tennis court and no one wore it after Labor Day, and she had been to debutante balls even if she hadn’t been a debutante herself. Mia had assumed Pilar would end up in law school—both her parents were attorneys—so when she told Julian that Pilar had a plan for Carter, what she meant, she said now, was that Pilar would get Carter to go to law school, too.

“I doubt it,” Julian said. “Everyone goes to law school. That alone would make Carter not do it.”

But soon October became November, and as everyone prepared to return home for Thanksgiving, the senior class was overcome by anxiety. The career counseling office extended its hours, so that when Julian walked past at nine at night he would see some classmate huddled over a book of résumés, anxiously contemplating his future. Julian was mildly anxious himself, but Carter, it was obvious, was more so. He kept a calendar on the wall above his bed and he had begun to use that calendar as a countdown to liftoff.

That night, the four of them were eating dinner at Bamonte’s, where the first Wednesday of every month was Wig Night: everyone who showed up wearing a wig got to eat at half price. Carter, seeing the thatch of dark curls pasted to Julian’s head, said, “Look at Wainwright, he’s wearing a poodle.” Carter’s own wig was bright orange, and he was also wearing oversized clown shoes, which he waved about like flippers.

“I’m wearing lynx,” Mia said. “Or is it otter?”

“Watch out for PETA,” Julian said.

Mia fingered the ropy tendrils. “Actually, it’s pure synthetic. Woolworth’s special, for nine-ninety-nine.”

Pilar wore a blond wig, and she sat sipping her Coke, saying that if another person asked whether she was Marilyn Monroe, she would have a fit. “It’s not like there aren’t other blondes out there.”

The waiter gave them the once-over. He was wearing a wig himself, and the effect was of a sandy-haired Rastafarian.

They chewed silently while Bamonte’s pumped out songs from the jukebox and everyone beneath their wigs had started to sweat. Carter looked pensively at his watch as if he were checking not just the time but the number of days left in college. “All right,” he said, “fess up. What are you guys doing when you graduate?”

Although the subject preoccupied them, they’d avoided talking about it until now. Even alone, the two couples had been leery of bringing it up. Were they making plans together or apart?

“I’ve thought about architecture school,” Mia admitted. “Or anthropology.”

“Mia’s made it through the A’s,” Pilar said.

Mia laughed. “Sometimes I think I could do almost anything.”

“What I want to do is nothing,” said Carter.

Julian said, “I plan to write.”

“That’s one way of doing nothing,” Carter said.

Mia’s father wanted her to get a Ph.D.—“He thinks without one you’re not really educated”—and Pilar acknowledged she was considering law school. Mia mentioned the Peace Corps, and Carter said, “What about Wainwright?”

“Julian can come along. We can do the Peace Corps together.”

Carter laughed. “Have you ever been camping with Julian? He brings an inflatable mattress.” Carter removed from his bookbag a stack of papers. “Look what I stole from Career Counseling.” It was the Myers Briggs personality test. You answered a series of questions, and depending on your answers you were placed into one of sixteen types, which helped you choose a career.

“You actually took one of those tests?” Julian said.

“They’re based on Carl Jung’s typologies,” said Carter. “You’ve read Jung, haven’t you?”

Now, as if to prove what he thought of career counseling, Carter shredded a page of the Myers Briggs test, leaving a heap of confetti on his pasta plate. But then Mia was saying, “Come on, Carter, try it out on us.” So, over tiramisu and cannolis, Carter read from the remaining pages. “‘Yes or no. You find it difficult to express your feelings.’…‘You often think about humankind and its destiny.’…‘You believe the best decision is one that can be easily changed.’…‘You find it difficult to speak loudly.’…‘You prefer to isolate yourself from outside noises.’…‘You feel involved when watching TV soaps.’…‘You value justice more highly than mercy.’…‘You are almost never late for your appointments.’…‘Your desk, workbench, etc., is usually neat and orderly.’…”

After every question their voices rang out, and Carter, pen in hand, made a show of writing down what they said, though they all knew he wasn’t keeping track.

Soon the check came, and Carter signed the credit card slip “C. Myers Briggs.”

Now, back at the co-op, Julian exclaimed, “God bless Carl Jung!” and they all deposited themselves into the hot tub, the four of them naked except for their wigs.

“May we never graduate!” Pilar said and, one by one, Carter released the remaining pages of the test. The group of them watched the paper float away, the ink melting in the bubbles and the heat, and they closed their eyes and passed around a beer and declared their intentions not to think about the future.

But later that night, Julian saw Carter sitting alone in the garden.

“Want to take a ride?” Carter said, offering Julian a seat in his own car.

They drove through town and out of Northington, the car gliding over the road. “Are you kidnapping me?”

“We keep going straight,” Carter said, “and we hit California.” Rain had begun to fall, and Carter turned on the windshield wipers. There was a series of red lights, and then the traffic cleared and what was left before them was farmland, cows and horses dappled in the moonlight.

“What’s going to happen when we graduate?” Carter said. “I can’t believe you don’t take this seriously.”

“Heinz, you’re not going to turn into a pumpkin.”

To the sides of the road stood bushes and a few evergreens; most of the trees had divested themselves of leaves, and the bare branches rose and fell in the wind, like arms being raised above someone’s head.

“So you want to write fiction,” Carter said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“You know I do.”

“That’s not really an option for me.”

“Of course it is.”

Carter looked over at him. “So you go sit in a café in Paris? Or Kyoto, or Prague, or wherever they’re doing it now?”

“That’s not what I had in mind.”

“Writing is for rich people.”

“Investment banking is for rich people. Writing is something else.”

“You’re a trust fund kid,” Carter said.

“Maybe so,” said Julian. But if Carter believed that was who he was at heart, he didn’t know anything about him.

Ahead of them, a raccoon stepped onto the road, and Carter swerved around it. He cracked open the window and a breeze came in; there was the scent of sea and lilac. “Do you really think we’ll be friends in ten years?”

“I hope so,” Julian said.

“My father’s always saying that college is the great equalizer. Here, we’re all taking the same courses and eating the same meals. But then we graduate and gravitate toward our own kind.”

“In that case,” Julian said, trying to lighten things, “you better make a lot of money.”