Matrimony (21 page)

Later, though, she grew depressed: she was thirty-one and going on dates. In spare moments, she wondered about old boyfriends, Glen, for instance, whom she’d gone out with in high school and who was now living in Indiana, having married a woman who had grown up there. She recalled a German exchange student she’d met when she was fifteen, how everything between them in their brief relationship had been fraught with import for the simple reason that he spoke such poor English and she spoke no German and it took so much effort for them to communicate.

But it was Derek she thought about most, Derek, whom she’d met when she was eighteen. She was taking off a year before college, working as a nanny to two French children, and it was in a café in Aix-en-Provence that she saw Derek for the first time, standing in line with his knapsack of groceries.

“You’re too young to be a mother,” Derek said, seeing Claudette and Emile trailing behind Mia.

“You’re right,” Mia said. “I’m their au pair.”

Mia introduced the children to Derek, and then, realizing she hadn’t done so already, she introduced herself.

Derek spoke to her in his clumsy French, until it was determined that she knew English, too, that English, in fact, was her first language. Derek’s English was clumsy as well, but in a different way from how his French was clumsy. He sounded as if he’d learned English from an elderly British lady, which, it turned out, he had. “How do you do?” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Sitting across from Mia, Derek said, “Do you think the baby needs his diaper changed?”

“It’s possible.” Mia reached into her bag and removed a diaper.

“Wait,” Derek said. “I’ll do it. I’m good at changing diapers.” He laid Emile across the table and moved him from side to side, as if he were basting a turkey. “Not so bad,” he said when he was done.

Mia wasn’t sure what Derek meant, whether he was saying that changing diapers wasn’t so bad or that he wasn’t so bad at doing it. But since both were true, she said, “You’re right.”

“My brother has children,” Derek explained. “You have to be careful when you change the boys. They pee in your face.”

After that day, Derek would come to the café to look for Mia. He asked her to tell him when she would be there, but she rarely knew in advance. Emile napped irregularly, and sometimes Claudette had a play date. Occasionally Mia would be allowed to borrow the family car to take the children to parks and museums in nearby towns, and sometimes on longer excursions, to Lyon, for example, where she would walk with Claudette and Emile through the different neighborhoods, past the men hawking wares on the street. She enjoyed these trips, liked having the children to herself, discovering a city that was new to all three of them. Most of all, she liked being behind the wheel of their parents’ Peugeot, the shifting up and down from gear to gear, the activity of driving. Other times, however, without the car, consigned to a house that wasn’t hers, pressed into the company of two toddlers, she found herself growing lonely. She was by nature a solitary person; in high school and before she had always preferred to remain on the periphery. But it was one thing to be on the periphery voluntarily, another thing to have no choice in the matter. Now, in Provence, she longed for companionship. She would walk past the café, hoping Derek would be there, always glancing in as she went by.

Derek had long, fragile-looking fingers, and the image Mia kept was of him scooping his hands through a barrel of mangoes. He looked like a schoolboy carrying his groceries in his knapsack. On that knapsack, like a heraldic coat of arms, was a patch with the words “Derek and the Dominos” on it.

Mia would come to the café at eleven in the morning and find Derek waiting for her. And at two. And at four-thirty.

“I thought you were a student,” she said.

“I am.”

“Are you playing hooky?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you go to class?”

“Sure I do.” Derek removed his folder and showed Mia his notes, as if she were the professor checking his homework.

His name was Takeshi in Japanese, which was, Mia thought, a long way from Derek, but here in Provence with all these English-speaking foreign students he wanted a name English-speakers could pronounce, so he chose Derek, after Derek and the Dominos. Derek loved American rock music. He was always asking Mia about obscure American bands, and every time she didn’t know one he looked at her with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. It was as if he thought that being proximate to the United States, having grown up in a country that actually touched it, Mia had a knowledge of American music that wasn’t available to him.

They read
The International Herald Tribune
together, Derek scanning for news about Japan. He told Mia about Prime Minister Nakasone and the Japanese economy. He spoke adoringly of Japanese cuisine, and of his own mother’s cooking, which was, he said, what he missed most about home. “I want to take you out for sushi,” he said.

“But I don’t like sushi.”

“Are you a vegetarian?”

“No,” she said. “I just don’t like fish.”

But Derek still wanted to take her out for sushi, so they agreed to go and Mia would eat the vegetable sushi.

The following week, when they went out, Mia and Derek ate asparagus sushi and shiitake mushroom sushi and a plate of oshinko, Japanese pickles, though Derek, apologetically, also ate some fish.

And the next morning when he saw her at the café, he had a present for her.

“Sushi earrings!” Mia exclaimed. Each one was a plastic shrimp pinioned to a bed of rice.

“Just don’t eat them,” Derek said.

Mia introduced Derek to the family she worked for and to the other people she knew in town. “This is my friend Derek,” she would say, and Derek would stick out his hand and say, “I’m pleased to meet you.”

But afterward, once the person had left, Derek became taciturn and morose. “Why do you always tell people I’m your friend?”

“Because you are my friend.”

“I don’t want to be your friend,” he said.

“Why not?”

Derek was silent, and in that silence Mia waited for him to say what she realized she’d been waiting for him to say for some time now. “I want to be more than friends.”

“Oh, Derek.”

“I like you.”

“I like you, too, Derek.”

“But you don’t want to be my girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She could have told him she wasn’t attracted to him, but why wasn’t she attracted to him? At the university, the American girls herded after him, seeing the gentleness Mia saw in him and finding him exotic as well, so different from the boys they’d gone to high school with. But Derek didn’t wish to be thought of as exotic. And he wasn’t drawn to these American girls, though in his own way, doing so with as much humility as the circumstances would allow, he let slip to Mia that these girls were interested in him, hoping that the knowledge that other girls liked him would make Mia like him, too. But it didn’t work. Mia tried to imagine Derek in Japan, wondered whether in Kyoto he would seem as unprotected as he did in France, or whether, speaking his own language, he would have a layer of guardedness he couldn’t muster here. All she knew was that in Aix, talking English, Derek spoke with so little artifice it should have been enough to make her like him. But it didn’t. “I don’t know why.”

In Mia’s experience, when you told a guy you didn’t like him he tried to convince you you did; he turned your feelings into a subject of debate. But Derek, thank God, didn’t do this. It wasn’t everything or nothing—he was still willing to be her friend—and Mia was so relieved that the next time she saw him, standing outside the café with his knapsack of groceries, she allowed him to kiss her. It was just a kiss, she figured; it wasn’t a big deal.

But to Derek it was. He took it as a sign that Mia had reconsidered, and when it became clear that she hadn’t, he grew disconsolate. “I think I love you,” he said.

“Please, Derek, don’t say that.”

“I
want
to say it.”

But Derek couldn’t get Mia to say it back, and when he discovered, finally, that there was nothing he could do to make her love him, he became angry. “I think there’s something wrong with you.”

Mia’s heart pitched. She had heard these words before. Boys were always falling in love with her and she was always not quite falling in love back. It had happened with Glen, whom she did love but whom she hadn’t managed to love as much as he loved her. Being with Glen, Mia began to wonder whether there really was something wrong with her; maybe she was incapable of love. The possibility so unnerved her that she agreed not to break up with Glen, hoping that over the summer she’d learn to love him the way he wanted her to. And when it didn’t happen, when she felt about him the kind of vague admiration she’d felt for some time now, she told herself she was distracted and perhaps when she returned from France things would be different. It was enough to allow her to feel she wasn’t lying when she explained to Derek that she had a boyfriend back home.

“You never told me about him,” Derek said.

“You never asked me.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Don’t you think if you loved him I’d know about him? Wouldn’t he always be on your mind?”

But how much on someone’s mind did a person have to be in order for you to love him? Mia suspected this was a dense question, and that anyone who asked a question like this was automatically disqualified from loving someone else, and from being loved in return.

“So you don’t love your boyfriend, either,” Derek said, and Mia let the accusation stand.

After that, she and Derek saw each other less. It was March, and she would be leaving France in a few months. They still occasionally got together at the café, but there was a remoteness between them that hadn’t existed before, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

The week before she left, she realized she’d never heard Derek speak Japanese, and suddenly it seemed like the most essential thing. “I want to hear you speak your language,” she said.

“Why?”

“Please, Derek, I’m asking you a favor.” She felt like a voyeur, as if she were grabbing something that wasn’t rightfully hers.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Whatever you like.” She was afraid he would tell her he loved her, that he was going to say it in Japanese. But it would have been all right if he did, since she didn’t understand Japanese, and for a moment she actually wanted him to say it. Fleetingly, she thought she loved him, too, and the fact that she felt it, even if briefly, filled her with tremendous relief.

Then Derek began to speak. He spoke whole sentences in Japanese, for how long, Mia wasn’t sure, but it felt like minutes, and it was ravishing.

“What did you say?”

“I said I hope you enjoy college.”

“But you spoke for so long. Please, Derek, tell me what you said.”

“I want my sushi earrings back.”

“But you gave them to me.” She took hold of the earrings as if he might grab them from her.

“It was nice to meet you, Mia.”

“Nice to meet me? Is that one of the phrases you learned in your English class? Nice to meet me, Derek! You act as if we didn’t spend the whole year together.”

“What difference does it make? I’m leaving, and so are you.”

“So is this goodbye?”

Derek nodded.

“I’m not leaving for another few days,” she said. “We could see each other again.”

“I have exams to study for.” Derek reached out to shake her hand, and not knowing what to do, she took it.

The day before she left, she found a piece of paper in her mailbox with Derek’s name and address on it and the words “Write me” in his handwriting. He must have gotten hold of her address, too, because a few weeks after arriving at Graymont, she received a letter from him.

When she came to college, she had a singular goal: she was going to fall in love with someone. But at college, love felt elusive to her. Boys trailed after her the way they had in high school, and without even realizing it, she carried herself with just enough aloofness to make her seem doubly appealing. That first month at school, she slept with someone from one of her classes, but it felt almost obligatory—a rite of passage: she’d made it to college—and she didn’t sleep with him again.

Her first semester, she took calculus, linguistics, anthropology, music appreciation, and—her favorite—introductory Japanese. Late at night, she would sit in the library carrels memorizing her kanji, thinking of Derek as she did so. He had taught her a few Japanese phrases, enough to make her feel the language wasn’t foreign, at least for the first hour of the first day of class, until she realized it was. But she was improving. That was one of the gratifying things about learning a language; it was easy to trace your progress. By November, she could actually speak some Japanese. She even wrote a letter to Derek composed entirely in Japanese. It was filled with mistakes, no doubt, but it was a Japanese letter, written in a script that until recently had been no more familiar to her than cuneiform. It was hard to keep up with Derek. For every letter she wrote him, he wrote three. Sometimes she felt she should give up writing him entirely; she needed a less prolific Japanese pen pal. Then, in the spring, she met Julian. Those first weeks, she felt beyond the exuberance a pleasing vindication. So people had been wrong: she
could
fall in love. It was as if Derek himself intuited this, for his letters stopped coming, and she stopped writing him, too.

Now, in Ann Arbor, she thought of Derek again, sweet, fragile-fingered Derek walking along the streets of Aix. She wanted to write him, but she’d misplaced his address years ago. She knew him, besides, as Derek, which wasn’t his real name.

Then, one night at three
A.M
., she remembered it. Takeshi. Takeshi Moriyama. She tracked down his address.

Dear Derek,

It’s Mia. Do you remember me? We were friends in 1985, in Aix-en-Provence. We spent the year together….

A month later Derek wrote back.

Dear Mia,

Of course I remember you. So much has happened since 1985. I live in Kyoto and teach economics at the university. Perhaps I can see you sometime in the United States. Occasionally I’m invited to give lectures there. My son loves America and I’ve promised him a trip to the U.S. someday. I’ve never been to Michigan but I’ve been to Chicago. Maybe we can meet in between.