Matrimony (13 page)

In Trilby’s high school, there had been nothing to do but have sex and watch football. (Trilby had grown up in a town that lived for high school football. “And that was the adults,” she told Julian. She was so impassioned in her aversion to sports that Julian didn’t have the heart to admit he was a sports fan himself.) And so she’d done her best to play along. But when she was a senior, she applied early to the University of Chicago, because it was a good school, but also because in a ranking of party schools it had come in dead last.

Yet as soon as she got to Chicago, she was miserable. The weather was freezing, she told Julian, but in a different way from how it was freezing back home, and Hyde Park felt rarefied and alien. She stayed in Chicago for three semesters, then spent the next couple of years bumming around Europe. First in Stockholm and then in a small town an hour outside Oslo, she worked off the books as a bar waitress. Finally, when she returned to the United States, she decided to enroll at the University of Michigan. It was a good school and she was used to the cold, and Michigan accepted her credits from Chicago without hassle or complaint.

“But then you were forced to study with me,” Julian said.

“I wouldn’t say
forced
.”

“I would.”

“Okay,” she said, laughing. “But it’s been the best thing that’s happened to me.”

The first time she came to Julian’s office hours, Trilby was surprised, she admitted, to be enrolled in composition. Even if she’d been a freshman, she would have regarded composition with barely suppressed disdain. She had placed out of composition at the University of Chicago, and this, paradoxically, was what prevented her from placing out of it at the University of Michigan, which wasn’t interested in giving her credit for work she’d done in high school. But now she was a junior, having spent two years abroad, which made her four years older than the rest of Julian’s students. She was closer to his age than to theirs, and this flustered him. Or maybe it was the fact that she was so pretty and he, as the teacher, wasn’t supposed to notice. He worried the other students would think he was playing favorites, but at a certain point it became comical: whom else was he supposed to favor? Trilby was so much better than her classmates that they appeared to regard her as Julian’s assistant. It was possible she was a genius, he thought. It was also possible she just seemed that way compared with his other students, who were respectful and well-meaning and by and large not unintelligent but next to whom Trilby appeared as enormous—she was, in fact, five ten—as Lionel Trilling.

Perhaps, Julian thought, Trilby looked at him the same way. Maybe she was comparing him with the rest of the room and not to her other professors. Whatever the reason, instead of resenting him, as he thought she might, she had come to respect him, to like him, even, and he, in turn, liked her back.

Yet too often he would forget that she was his student and there were things he wasn’t supposed to say to her. Trilby seemed to encourage this; it was as if she wanted him to cross a line. Now, sitting across from him at the café, she said, “Can you believe class yesterday?”

“So you thought things got out of hand?”

“
I’ll
say.”

“Chalk it up to December. Everyone’s got vacation on the brain.”

“College,” Trilby mused. “It brings out the solipsist in the best of us.”

“And sometimes not the best of us,” Julian said, and there he was again, having been drawn into Trilby’s trap, commenting unfavorably on his students.

The purpose of Julian’s course was to teach the students essay writing: how to come up with a thesis statement and defend it, how to write an introduction and conclusion, how to make good transitions from paragraph to paragraph. This was, he understood, an important skill, but over the course of the semester it got stultifying to read so many such papers, and so for a few weeks he’d had his students writing personal essays. He had even, one week, encouraged them to write fiction, an idea Trilby had taken him up on, and she’d produced a small, affecting story about a woman whose husband, much younger than she, dies suddenly, a narrative meditation on grieving. Julian copied the story and handed it out to the class, but they hadn’t been impressed.

“I guess you can’t please everyone all the time,” Trilby said when she next saw Julian in office hours.

“Don’t listen to them,” Julian said. “That story was terrific.”

Occasionally, the composition instructors would hold meetings and the conversation would invariably turn to the poor quality of student writing. Julian, who had as much bad writing as anyone else, nonetheless felt self-conscious joining in the lament, a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds complaining about college students. Besides, if anything, he found the student responses to one another’s work more disheartening than the work itself, for it was always the best writing that they appreciated least and the sentimental, cliché-ridden papers they gravitated to. Once, flummoxed by a student’s response, Julian—he would later regret having been so peremptory—simply said, “I’m sorry, Steven, but you’re wrong,” and ended all discussion.

This was why he decided, after Trilby’s story, that it was best not to continue having his students write fiction, best, even, to discontinue the writing of personal essays, which were near enough cousins to fiction anyway. It was all too close to home, having his students write creatively—he wondered how Professor Chesterfield had managed to do it—and he was torn between being aghast at how bad their work was and worrying that when he was eighteen his own work had been as bad, or, worse, that it still was as bad but that he was too close to what he wrote to realize it.

Yet even argumentative essays could become personal. Yesterday, discussion had broken down when two football players argued that student athletes should be paid for playing college sports. A drama student said that if student athletes were paid, student actors should be paid as well. Soon everyone was calling out about their own experience, and it was in a brief break in the shouting that Julian heard Trilby murmur, “Enough about me; what do
you
think about me?”

Now, at the café, she said, “You know what you should do? Put a moratorium on all first-person pronouns. From now on, no one can use the word ‘I’ in their papers.”

“If I did that,” Julian said, “there would be other problems.”

Trilby shrugged. “What would Descartes say if he were alive now? ‘I have an opinion, therefore I am’?”

“Well, well, well.”

“I know,” she said. “You should make me go up to the blackboard and write a hundred times, ‘I will not be such a snot-nosed student.’”

“You’re not snot-nosed.”

A drop of apple cider hung on Trilby’s lip, and presently she licked it away. She brushed a filament of curls behind her ear, only to have them fall down again. “Do you have other students coming?”

“The whole crew.”

“Okay,” she said, “then let’s talk about my paper.”

“Your paper’s terrific,” he said. “Your first draft is better than other people’s second drafts.”

She looked at him mildly, as if to say, “Damning with faint praise.”

“All right,” he said, “it’s better than
my
second draft.”

His response didn’t fluster her. She had confidence, he thought, perhaps too much of it. Earlier in the semester she had written about
Roe v. Wade,
and though she was pleased with how the Supreme Court had decided, she faulted Justice Blackmun for a weak opinion, the implication being that if she herself had been on the Supreme Court a woman’s right to choose would have been more firmly buttressed. Strong words from a twenty-three-year-old. Yet she had managed to say them without arrogance. There was, in fact, a vulnerability to her, a tentativeness, even, to how she was looking at him now.

She said, “I’m giving myself a crash course in jurisprudence. I’m writing about moral desert. One ‘s,’ not two.” She fingered the handle of her cider mug, tapping it a couple of times.

“I know,” he said. “I read your paper.” He held it up for her to see. It was studded with check marks.

“Humor me,” she said. “Let me revise.”

“Okay,” said Julian. He was all for revision. He believed it separated the real writers from the dilettantes.

Trilby was writing this time about affirmative action and, more broadly, about the idea of merit. She was arguing not simply that university admission wasn’t an entitlement but that human beings didn’t own their endowments, that intelligence and diligence were qualities people exhibited but didn’t in any moral sense deserve. She was using Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Dworkin, some of whom Julian hadn’t read himself.

“So you’re telling me you have seventeen more of these?”

Julian nodded ruefully.

“I’d hate to know your hourly wages.”

“They’re even worse than you think.”

“So why do you do it?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. It was eleven o’clock, and students were passing in and out of the café. It was rush hour, Julian thought, and this was Ann Arbor’s subway.

“Tell me.”

“First of all, my college creative writing professor recommended me.”

“You couldn’t have said no?”

“It would have been hard. This friend of mine thinks something Freudian is going on. That my professor is a father substitute.”

“Is he?”

“It’s possible.”

“And second of all?”

“My wife wanted me to take the job. Which is a long story in its own right.”

A biscuit had come with Trilby’s cider, and she was nibbling at it now, leaving a trail of crumbs across the table. “Sometimes I feel bad that this is what you do, teaching composition to college kids. It seems beneath you.”

“Nothing’s beneath me,” Julian said balefully.

“Oh, come on.”

“I know,” he said. “Self-pity isn’t attractive.”

“Don’t you worry it can infect you? Day after day with the commas and semicolons?”

“It’s my job,” he said. “Besides, I worry I’m good at it. And there’s a beauty to precision, don’t you think?” Trilby of all people had to know what he was saying. From the start, he’d counted on her to give examples to the class. She wrote on the blackboard, “The children who are good will get candy,” followed by “The children, who are good, will get candy,” and explained the difference to everyone. When he lamented his students’ punctuation, when he noted that they reflexively placed commas between adjectives, she wrote, “My first beautiful wife,” followed by “My first, beautiful wife,” and distinguished between the two. Seeing her standing in her black boots and jeans, her blond hair tucked like a scarf into her turtleneck, hearing the sound of the chalk pressed against the blackboard, Julian thought he might be a little in love with her. Trilby was beautiful—how could he not notice?—but in the end she’d won his heart because she knew the difference between “which” and “that.”

“I used to like to diagram sentences,” she said.

Julian thought of his own adventures in sentence diagramming, late at night in his childhood bedroom looking out at the East River. “My wife thinks I’m a schoolmarm,” he said. “I’m the guy reading the
Times Magazine
who exults when they mistake ‘forego’ for ‘forgo.’”

“At least you’re not a prig about it.”

“I hope I’m not.”

Trilby canted her head as if trying to get a better look at him. Her hair brushed across the table.

“Mia tells me I seduced her with Strunk and White.”

“Did you?”

“I guess I did. On our first date, I gave her the highlights of my childhood malapropisms. ‘No holes barred’ instead of ‘no holds barred.’ ‘For all intensive purposes.’” He shrugged. “I was eighteen.”

“When I was eighteen…” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“It’s not even worth going into.” Trilby looked around her, at the clusters of her classmates in repose. “Clearly I’ve come to the wrong college. You should see how guys try to seduce you here.”

By the door, in the shadows, a young man was standing in an orange parka. A student of Julian’s. Trilby rose from her seat. “I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”

“Trilby, come on.”

She was standing above him, holding a mitten in each hand. “You want to know the real reason I was late today?”

“Sure.”

“I was in the Hopwood Room.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where the creative writing program’s offices are. You’ve never been there?”

Julian shook his head.

“They have a whole table of literary journals. I was reading your story. The one in
The Missouri Review
.”

“It’s in there?”

“I loved it,” she said. “Would you believe me if I told you I cried?”

He was silent for a second.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re blushing. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cold.” She held up a compact for him to see.

“I don’t take compliments well,” he admitted.

“Well, your story was wonderful,” she said. “I wish I could write something like that.” She wrapped her scarf around her neck and turned to go. “Take care of yourself, Julian.” Then she walked through the café and out the door, disappearing down State Street.

Now another semester was under way, another composition class, another set of papers. Occasionally Julian ran into Trilby on the street and they stopped to talk for a few minutes. “You’ve spoiled me,” he said. “My students this semester seem like dolts.”

“Probably because they are,” Trilby said, and then, seeming sorry for having been so uncharitable, she said, “I’m sure you have some good ones.”

One time she suggested they get coffee, but so far, at least, they hadn’t done so, and the more time passed, the less likely it seemed that they would. Now, when they greeted each other on the street, they rarely stopped to talk.

It was February. Snow piled high on the ground, and Julian, who had finally managed to liberate his and Mia’s car, had, after the last storm, capitulated to the drifts. The apartment building they lived in had sixteen apartments but only eight parking spots, and now that he’d secured one, he considered leaving the car there for the rest of the winter, which in Ann Arbor could run well into April; eight inches of snow had fallen on April Fool’s Day last year. Their car looked, Julian thought, like a woolly mammoth. All the cars in town did, rows of mammals frozen in mid-step, these lumps lining State Street and South University, an occasional headlight protruding. “We should just blowtorch the car and ride around in snowmobiles.”