Matrimony (16 page)

“Sometimes I wonder whether we made a mistake,” she said now. “Getting married how we did.”

“Shotgun?”

It had been a practical matter, but did it have to be
so
practical? She, in particular, had treated the wedding rituals with disdain, as if she were above it all. In Ann Arbor, she was the person friends turned to with their marriage proposal story, thinking that she, being married herself, would understand the flutter. She knew the story about the hidden engagement ring that beeped in the metal detector and how the man had to convince airport security not to make him empty his pockets. She knew the story about the jeweler who hadn’t produced the ring on time and had to deliver it at midnight to the hotel. But when someone asked her about her own wedding proposal, she had to admit there hadn’t really been one.

“None?”

“Not in the traditional sense.” She couldn’t tell the truth—she disapproved of marriage proposals—because she was talking to someone who had just been proposed to. Back then, she’d given everyone an earful, about how she and Julian would get married as they wished to. If anybody was going to propose, it would be she, because she found it detestable that the woman was supposed to wait. But she didn’t wish to propose, either. Marriage was a decision she and Julian had reached together, and to turn it into a question a person asked on one knee smacked of playacting. She was no more interested in an engagement ring than in a proposal—this, too, she found repugnant, as if the groom were purchasing the bride—and she considered diamond rings garish. She didn’t see why the bride was supposed to wear white, when no one was a virgin any longer. When someone said to her, “Don’t you want people to know who the bride is?” she said, “I’ll be the one up front next to the groom.” It was her wedding, she explained, and she would wear a red dress if she wanted to. And she wouldn’t walk down the aisle carrying flowers, because she didn’t carry flowers in general and to do so on her wedding day felt contrived. No matter that the florist told her that in twenty-five years she had never seen a bride not carry flowers: all the more reason, Mia thought. She wasn’t interested in doing what everyone else did. In fact, everyone else’s doing something was grounds enough not to do it.

She wrote the wedding invitations by hand because it was more personal that way. Besides, the printed invitations always came from the parents of the bride, the wedding itself thrown by them as if they were paying off the groom’s family. And the announcement in
The New York Times:
she disapproved of that as well, your résumé paraded for the world to see, as if in a breeder’s catalogue, and she made her parents promise not to send an announcement to the
Times
. The garter belt—there would be none of that. As for the wedding cake, which the groom was supposed to feed to the bride as if to an infant: she saw no reason to have a wedding cake at all.

“I never thought of you as so political,” a friend said to her.

She hated that word “political,” the way it was used as a billy club to make you seem shrill when what you were saying was so sensible it shouldn’t have needed repeating. It wasn’t a question of politics, it was a question of her dignity, and of Julian’s too, and if defending her dignity was political, then she was more political than she’d realized.

“Are you changing your name?” someone asked her.

“Yes,” she said tartly. “I’m changing it to Julian.”

She reminded herself that the wedding was just a party, and she made Julian promise that they would celebrate the anniversary of their first night together as much as they celebrated their wedding anniversary. “Even more so,” she said, because that was when their relationship had begun and the wedding was just an affirmation of what was already true. She and Julian bought matching mood rings, which they wore in the month leading up to the event, and on the actual day they were accompanied by Mary, the Newfoundland Julian had walked at college, acting as ring bearer, lumbering down the aisle with the rings inside her mouth, to the guests’ amusement and applause. Slimy, saliva-coated rings, but they were her and Julian’s rings and it was their wedding. It was exactly as she’d wanted it.

So why now, lying next to Julian, why, after a dinner party that had gone well, was she smarting? Perhaps, she thought, she should have gotten a wedding gown. At the very least, she wished she hadn’t worn that red dress again because now it was as if the wedding had been diluted and the dress was just an outfit she’d worn to a number of parties, several of which she couldn’t recall. She didn’t want an engagement ring, but the rings she and Julian had gotten had long ago been put away in a drawer—they weren’t going to wear mood rings indefinitely—and hadn’t been replaced by anything else. She wished she hadn’t refused to videotape the event, especially since a friend of theirs had offered to do it unobtrusively with a handheld camera. She had seen a talk show that featured women who couldn’t get over their wedding day. When the women’s husbands left for work, the wives put on their wedding gowns and secretly, like alcoholics, spent the day watching their wedding video. But was that the only choice, either watch your videotape all day long or not have a videotape at all? Because looking back, all she could remember was the blur of her and Julian walking down the aisle with Mary shambling in front of them.

“Would you have married me if I’d proposed?” she said now.

“What do you mean? You did propose.”

“But I didn’t ask you formally. No one got down on one knee.”

She got out of bed and kneeled before him. “Will you marry me, Julian?”

He laughed.

“Come on. Tell me you’ll marry me.”

“I’ll marry you,” he said.

The next day, they went to a jeweler and purchased rings, simple silver bands for each of them. But the gesture felt past due, as if they’d bought clothes for someone who had already outgrown them.

And Julian, walking through town the next few weeks, found himself playing with his wedding ring. He’d never worn jewelry before and he couldn’t get used to it.

Late one night he ran into Trilby. She looked perplexed, as if she’d discovered something new, and Julian assumed this was because she’d caught him leaving the local sports bar. It was only after a few seconds that he realized she was staring at his left hand.

“You’re wondering about my wedding ring?”

She nodded.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

She smiled at him. “You’re full of long stories, aren’t you?”

But before he could respond, she had turned to go. He watched her walk down William Street to Cottage Inn Pizza, where she opened the door and stepped inside.

Berkeley, California

Julian had lain down
across three empty seats, a pillow propping his head up, but now that the movie was starting, he sat up and inserted his earphones. There was an individual TV in front of each seat, and he had spent several minutes watching the little airplane move incrementally across the screen. He’d finished off his meal, a mushy chicken number with orange sauce that he nonetheless had consumed appreciatively. Whenever he flew, he felt as if he were a child once more—back then, he used to insist on being taken up to the cockpit to meet the pilot and check out the controls—both grateful and amazed that you could eat or watch anything so high in the air.

When Mia’s mother was alive, her parents used to fly separately for the children’s sake, and on the way to the airport this morning Julian had said, “If your parents really wanted to be safe they should have taken separate taxis and boarded the same plane. The fact is, you’re safer on a plane than in your own bathtub.”

“Well, it’s what my mother wanted,” Mia said. “And I hope you’d do the same for our children.”

The real argument was that Mia hoped to have children someday and Julian wasn’t sure he wanted to have them. They were thirty-one now. They had been in Ann Arbor for eight years; for the last three years, Mia had been writing her dissertation. Her research was on children who had lost a parent, and maybe that was why the work was slow going: it depleted her. Or maybe she’d been infected by Julian; they were the world’s two slowest writers. She had no idea when she would finish, but she knew she eventually wanted a child. Julian, on the other hand, didn’t want to think about children until he was done with his novel. When the subject came up on the way to the airport, a gloom settled over the car and they rode silently along the highway, the traffic noise coming through the open window. Julian hated when he and Mia fought, especially when they were about to part, and as she kissed him goodbye at the airport terminal, her face descending in a frown, he promised her he’d do what she asked, which was to keep an open mind about the subject.

As the plane dipped beneath the clouds, Julian could make out through his window the tops of palm trees. He felt as if he were landing in a foreign country, though he’d been in the air only four hours.

Soon he was out in the airport terminal, that eye-rubbing sensation of being thrust beneath glaring lights, and now, in baggage claim, as the suitcases came trundling out, Carter emerged like a piece of luggage himself, revolving on the baggage carousel.

“Jesus, Wainwright, what took you so long? I was starting to get dizzy.”

“I didn’t know you were coming to get me.”

“I had to fend off the security guard. A couple more revolutions and I would have been arrested.” Carter was wearing a seersucker jacket, and he had on white linen pants and shoes to match. He had let his hair grow out, and he was sporting sideburns.

“Look at you,” Julian said. “You’re like something out of a fashion magazine.” He stepped back and inspected Carter.

“So you approve?”

“Heinz, you’re blinding.” Julian grabbed his luggage. “Seriously, you didn’t have to come pick me up.”

“And allow you to get lost? There’s no grid out here. You’re not in New York City any longer.”

“Carter, I live in the Midwest now, remember?”

“Though you keep insisting Ann Arbor’s on East Coast time.”

Carter wasn’t the only one who couldn’t recall what time zone Julian was in. Julian’s friends on the East Coast kept forgetting, too, to the point that he wondered whether it was intentional.

“I’m sorry Mia couldn’t come,” Carter said.

“She’d have loved to,” said Julian. “But her dissertation adviser is back in town for the week, and you know how these things are. He’s the lord and she’s the serf.”

“Does this mean I’ll have to come visit Ann Arbor?” Since they’d moved to Michigan, Julian and Mia had been out to California twice, once to spend a spring break with Carter and Pilar, the other time for Carter and Pilar’s wedding. But so far, at least, Carter and Pilar hadn’t reciprocated. Julian spoke to Carter every couple of weeks and had been threatening to buy him a plane ticket. Failing that, he suggested he might try the opposite approach and start to call Carter collect.

Carter drove a convertible, and as he and Julian traveled north on 101, he pointed out the landmarks they passed, treating everything with a proprietary air. They passed Candlestick Park and the Cow Palace. San Francisco lay up ahead.

“Heinz, are you going to make me start calling you Esquire?”

Carter smiled. “Not until I get my degree.”

“It’s not like you need it. I suspect you could buy the law school at this point.”

“You think?”

“You know, for someone as talented and lucky as you are, you don’t make things easy on yourself.”

So Mia had been right: Carter had ended up in law school. But his path there had been circuitous, for his relationship with Pilar was a series of negotiations, of offers and concessions back and forth. It had been Carter’s turn when, after graduating from college, he and Pilar spent two years backpacking around the globe, and it was his turn, too, when they moved to California. But it was Pilar’s turn when they applied to law school. She wanted them to go to Stanford Law School and, when they graduated, to practice together, maybe start off working for the public defender and eventually open their own criminal defense firm.

But a few months after applications were due, Julian received a phone call from Carter in the middle of the night. “Pilar got into Stanford and I didn’t.”

“Jesus, Heinz. I thought your record was as good as hers.”

“It’s better, actually.”

“What happened, then?”

“I have no idea.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“I got into Berkeley Law School, at Boalt Hall.”

“So Pilar will go to Stanford and you’ll go to Boalt?”

“No,” Carter said. “Pilar’s going to Boalt, too. She insisted we do this together.”

His first semester at Boalt, Carter explained, he treated law school the way he’d treated college. Sometimes he went to class and sometimes he didn’t; often he slept until noon. One time the Civil Procedure professor called on him when he wasn’t there, and when no one answered, the professor marked this down in his book. Another time, in Torts, the professor called on him when he hadn’t done the reading and he answered anyway. Throughout college, he’d managed to talk about work he hadn’t read and to do so persuasively; he didn’t see why law school should be any different.

Then he got his fall grades. Two B’s and two C’s. Carter had never gotten a C before; even a B astounded him. For the first time in his life he’d failed at something, and fearing he’d been found out, he bought thick spiral notebooks and became the model of a diligent student, staying up late outlining his cases, raising his hand in class.

He did this for a full month, until he called Julian one night and said he was dropping out.

“You’re dropping out of law school because of one semester of bad grades?”

“I never wanted to go to law school in the first place.” Law school, Carter explained, had been Pilar’s idea, just as everything he’d ever done had been urged on him by others: his mother, Pilar, these well-meaning women he’d hitched himself to and under whose exhortations he operated.

“So what are you going to do instead?”

“Some friends of mine are forming an Internet startup. It’s called Signet, and they’re developing a handwriting-recognition software that can read medical records, claim forms, and digital tablets.”

“So you’re going to join them?”

Carter nodded. “You know how I’ve always dreamed of becoming rich.”

But Carter couldn’t possibly have dreamed that, once the company had gone public, he would leave, selling his stake for seventeen million dollars. He was twenty-nine and wealthier than he ever imagined he’d be, and though years later he’d tell Julian how fortunate he’d been—he’d gotten in during the boom and out before the bust—he must have already sensed he was lucky, for no one deserved to make seventeen million dollars for three years of work.

Carter was wealthy enough to retire, and that was what his friends thought he would do, especially Pilar, who claimed to be as shocked as anyone else when he decided to return to law school. He went back, he told Julian, because he believed that dropping out in the middle of his first year was sufficiently shameful that earning a hundred and fifty million dollars wouldn’t have made a difference. As he toiled down in Mountainview, where Signet’s offices were housed, those two B’s and two C’s hung over him, and he believed they would continue to do so until he did something about them. So he returned to law school with his indignation intact, and with a resolve to make his professors rue the grades they’d given him. He would make the admissions office at Stanford regret its decision, too.

Now, two years later, he’d succeeded. “Number one in my class,” he told Julian in the car, “discounting that fluke first semester. If only I’d set my mind to things from the start.”

“But then you wouldn’t have dropped out,” Julian said, “and you’d be seventeen million dollars poorer.”

They were on the Bay Bridge now and Carter said, “I’ve never told anyone this before, but whenever something good is about to happen, I think disaster will occur. It was that way with Signet. Once I decided to quit and we were working out my compensation, I was sure the company would go belly-up. And we were doing great. There was nothing to worry about.” He was quiet for a moment, staring out at San Francisco Bay, where a bird had landed. “My father was on the Bay Bridge the day of the big earthquake. He drove across it fifteen minutes before it collapsed. And the next morning he was back up in his hot-air balloons. I’m the same way. Things don’t scare me. But right now, I’m afraid this bridge will collapse and I’ll die before I graduate from law school. As if becoming a lawyer was what I wanted to do in the first place.” He pushed down on the gas and they accelerated, hurtling past the other cars toward the East Bay.

Commencement was taking place all across the country, but this was Berkeley, Julian thought. Growing up, he used to ride the subway to Morningside Heights and while away the hours on Columbia’s College Walk, imagining, vaguely, that he was a campus radical and it was 1968. He’d been born in 1968, and he maintained a romantic’s view of that time, especially of Berkeley, which he liked to think of as Columbia’s West Coast cousin.

Now, as he walked up Sproul Plaza to Sather Gate, he was greeted by protestors and bullhorns, students thrusting leaflets into his hands. Migrant workers. Genocide in Africa. Graduate student unionizers. He passed Dwinelle Hall and the graduate library. Up the hill was the law school, and the tennis courts facing Bancroft Way.

He headed over to People’s Park, site, as he imagined it, of mammoth protest, so he was disappointed to find that it was an abandoned field, home to a few panhandlers and a man in a wheelchair trailing a bag of empty soda cans, the metal clanking behind him.

It was seventy-five degrees out, he was wearing shorts and sneakers, and he wandered along College Avenue toward Oakland. He picked up an ice cream cone and stopped in a few stores, and before he realized it two hours had passed and he had to hail a cab so he wouldn’t be late for dinner.

When he arrived, Carter was standing in front of the restaurant, wearing a black silk jacket and a tie.

“Am I late?” Julian said. “And underdressed?” He had changed into khakis and an Oxford shirt.

“Late, yes,” said Carter. He didn’t say anything about Julian’s clothes. “I had to pull some strings. This wasn’t an easy reservation to get graduation week.”

Now, having been seated by the hostess, Julian unfolded his napkin on his lap. “So this is the famous Chez Panisse. Do you eat here often?”

“I’ve got my own chair here,” Carter said. “Someday they’re going to stuff it and put it in a museum.”

“And you along with it?”

“If I’m lucky.”

Shattuck Avenue was a busy street, but Chez Panisse was set back and felt secluded. Upstairs was the café, where you could get the poor man’s version of the restaurant’s food, though that wasn’t for the poor, either. Carter read through the wine list appraisingly. Between him and Julian, a single candle bobbed in a glass.

“Isn’t Pilar coming?”

Carter shook his head. “Pilar’s too busy to eat. These big law firms own you.”

A woman approached, and Carter rose to hug her. “Alice,” he said, “this is Julian, my buddy from college. He flew out from Michigan to see me graduate. Alice is responsible for my good health,” he told Julian. “I kid you not. She’s made me look at the world in a whole new way.”

Alone now, Carter said, “Do you realize who that was?”

“Alice?” said Julian.

“As in Alice Waters? Chef and owner of Chez Panisse? Spawner of a culinary revolution?” In college, Carter had subsisted on cheeseburgers, onion rings, potato chips, and chimichangas. He’d been contemptuous of anyone who regarded food as more than sustenance, and in this regard, at least, he had become the kind of person he’d once despised. He’d taken a couple of wine-tasting courses, and in his house, in a leather container next to the toilet, sat a pile of old issues of
Wine Spectator.
He’d befriended the produce buyers at Berkeley Bowl, and every Thursday when he shopped for groceries they would set aside a special basket for him filled with litchis, loquats, Pluots, and Apriums.

Chez Panisse served a prix fixe menu, and tonight it was grilled asparagus salad followed by pork shoulder, Chino Ranch carrots, and Jerusalem artichoke purée. Growing up, Julian had eaten with his parents in more expensive restaurants than this one, but his father was a meat-and-potatoes man who, though he found himself on occasion at Bouley Bakery or Le Cirque, was still happiest ordering a porterhouse at Peter Luger. Julian’s mother was the same way. “So has this made you happy?” Julian asked Carter.

“Eating here?”

“Your new life. It’s what you always wanted. To be rich.”

“It hasn’t made me
un
happy.”