Matrimony (25 page)

Then Julian understood. Years ago, when his father traveled on business, he would bring home the key from the hotel room he’d stayed in; the corporate mogul was filching hotel keys for his son. Julian had keys from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan, from Peru, Botswana, New Zealand, and Zimbabwe. He kept the keys in his desk, and when his father was away he’d take them out, trying to imagine where he was.

“I want you to have it,” his father said.

A hotel key card. Because even in Laos, in Luang Prabang, in sleepy cities just starting to embrace industry, hotels didn’t use real keys any longer; they used plastic key cards, and you didn’t even have to steal them, they were disposable. “Tell me about Lowell, Dad.”

“Who?”

“My uncle,” he said, and how curious that word felt emerging from his mouth, for he’d never really had an uncle, not one related by blood, at least.

Seeing his father’s eyes mist over, he said, “It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You probably don’t remember much.”

“I was only four when he died.”

“Did he look like me?” And it wasn’t until he said those words that he remembered his mother having told him this. The thought came to him, hauntingly, that he was his dead uncle reincarnated.

“At least in the pictures I’ve seen of him.”

His father’s lip quavered, and Julian thought,
Please, Dad, don’t cry.
He’d never seen his father cry, and he wasn’t sure he could endure it now, sitting across from him in his office. He got up to go.

“Wait, son.”

Julian stood opposite him as if commanded to.

“What I remember came afterward. My parents turned the house into a shrine to Lowell. When people asked how many children they had, they said two, and it was years later. Where was my brother? He was more alive to them dead than he’d been when he was alive, certainly more alive to them than I was.”

It had been his father’s ball Lowell had chased, an errant throw or kick, a four-year-old’s exuberance, and Lowell had gone after it, rushing toward the oncoming car. Julian didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. When he was a boy, his father had refused to play sports with him; he said he wasn’t athletic. Yet there were glints of memory, a teenager hitting a tennis ball against a church, his father catching it as he walked by. His father chasing the bus when he was late to work, running from Sixty-third Street to Sixty-second Street and overtaking it, the fleet-footed sight of him moving like an antelope. Was his father an athlete, after all?

Julian stood up to shake his father’s hand, and his father reached out and they were hugging. But they got tangled in the arms, so they started over, and this time they were gripping each other. It was as if they were inventing a new mode of affection, waving their arms up and down, two elephants in a tussle, and it wasn’t until they had separated, not until Julian was out of his father’s office and into the elevator, dropping precipitously from the thirty-eighth floor, that he started to cry.

It was eight-thirty in the morning when he arrived in Ann Arbor. A town of students, where the streets were abuzz long past midnight, but at this hour everyone was asleep. It was February, and the roads were snow-covered. He trod tentatively, feeling like an interloper, when, he realized, he’d been gone only six months, and except for his friends, no one would have found his presence remarkable.

At Shaman Drum, he scanned the New Fiction shelves, then picked up a
Michigan Daily
from outside the store. He headed down State Street, toward Hill and Packard, silently reciting the street names, as if to make sure he hadn’t forgotten them. He cut back up Monroe, past the law school and across the diag, passing Angell Hall where, no doubt, his old office was occupied by someone new.

It was eleven o’clock when he reached Mia’s apartment. She had moved out of their place on Kingsley Street and was living on the Old West Side. He’d looked her up this morning when he got to town and saw that she was listed on Fountain Street. He himself was still listed on Granger, where he’d last lived, and also, inexplicably, at their address on Kingsley. In Ann Arbor, it seemed, there was no erasing you. And in other places, too, for back in New York he was still served jury notices every couple of years, and no matter what he did he was unable to convince the city that he wasn’t a resident any longer and hadn’t been one since he’d left for college. Year after year the courts kept calling, until eventually he stopped answering the letters. He half expected to find a policeman at his door one day, ready to extradite him to New York.

He rang the bell but no one answered, and he was reaching into his bag to write a note when he heard footsteps on the stairs.

“Julian?” Mia said. “What are you doing here?” She was standing outside now, and she took a step back, as if to regard him afresh. “You look terrible.”

He laughed.

“No, I mean…”

“I’ve been driving all night,” he explained. “I was home in New York. I’m on my way back to Iowa.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“I am.”

“Do you want to take a nap?”

He hesitated.

“You’re thinking why would I trust you alone in my apartment? The world’s biggest snoop? The truth is, I don’t have a lot of secrets. And the ones I have, I can part with.” She held out her keys.

“I have another idea. Do you want to grab lunch?”

She laughed. “So, I get it. You need to leave town in order to have lunch with me? If I’d known, I’d have sent you away ages ago.”

They found a table at Red Hot Lovers, home to the world’s largest condiment selection. Julian piled relish on top of onions on top of barbecue sauce on top of pickles. He smiled at Mia. “You look good,” he said.

“You’re just not used to seeing me in a skirt.”

“Or in makeup.”

“It’s my nod to the work world. It’s how I remind myself I’m an adult.” She looked up at him. “How are you, Julian? How’s Iowa?”

“Savage.”

“Is your writing not going well?”

“My novel is stalled. On the other hand, I’ve been writing stories.”

“And you’re happy with those?”

He reached into his bag and removed a copy of
Harper’s.
It was the issue with his story in it; his name was printed on the front cover.

“Oh, Julian!”

Now, emboldened, he told Mia that
Harper’s
had accepted another story of his. Yet even as he said this, he felt a queasiness overtake him, as if he’d spent some capital without realizing he was doing so.

“It sounds like you’re the star of the program.”

“The program is filled with stars.” He touched his face, where there was several days’ growth of beard. Often he went a week without shaving, though for a time he’d had a full-fledged beard. His accidental beard, he called it; all his beards had begun that way. He might still have had that beard, but Mia hadn’t liked it, so he’d consented to shave it off. “What about you? Are you here for the long haul? Putting down roots?”

“You mean do I finally vote here?” Mia was a dual citizen, and when she and Julian moved to Michigan she refused to switch her registration because she insisted she was in Ann Arbor only on a layover. Now that layover had lasted almost ten years. Finally, she’d relented: she was officially a Michigander. “And do you know what happened? As soon as I established residency, I reached a breakthrough in my dissertation. I was going to be on the fifteen-year plan.”

“But you’re not any longer?”

“I’ll be defending next month.”

“Mia! Congratulations!”

“I’m even thinking of marching at commencement. It’s in the football stadium. Do you remember when we went to football games together?”

He smiled at her: did she think he had forgotten?

When they finished eating, they walked on Washtenaw, then up past the tennis courts to the Arboretum. Mia had taken up running when they moved to town, and sometimes Julian would run with her in the Arb. He was a good athlete, but he was partial to sports that involved balls, and eventually he tired of running, so he walked while she ran. “I’m power walking,” he would say, which sounded to him like an oxymoron, at least as he had come to understand power walking, which involved swiveling your hips and swinging your arms and generally making an ass of yourself. So he walked as unpowerfully as he could, and then he sprinted to catch up with Mia, and soon they started the process all over again.

Now they cut past hedges and bramble. Julian plucked a leaf and smelled it, the way at the produce stands in New York’s Chinatown he liked to raise the unfamiliar vegetables to his nose. His jeans were fraying at the cuffs, which was where they always went first. It happened that way with Mia, too, though, unlike her, he would continue to wear his jeans until there were holes everywhere, until there was practically nothing covering him.

A squirrel halted in their path, moving from side to side, as if hoping to get them to dance.

“We’re explorers,” he told Mia. “Think of me as Ferdinand Magellan.”

“And who am I?”

“Mrs. Magellan,” he said. “Francine.”

“Was that really her name?”

“Franny for short. Ferdinand and Franny Magellan.”

When they used to walk together, they would occasionally wander off onto private property. It always concerned Mia, traversing ground they weren’t supposed to be on, but Julian told her not to worry. It wasn’t as if someone would shoot them.

“You never know,” she’d said.

One time, Julian took out a squirt gun and sprayed her. “A trespasser has to defend himself.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Somebody will think it’s an actual gun and they’re liable to shoot you for real.”

Now, back on campus, she told him she had to go to the library. “I need to check my footnotes. It would be a shame not to graduate because I mispaginated the thing.”

He stood opposite her.

“So is this it?” she said.

“What?”

“I assume you have to leave.”

“I had to leave days ago. I already missed my turn in workshop.”

“Why aren’t you back in Iowa, anyway?”

“It’s a complicated story,” he said.

“Will you at least take a nap before you leave?”

He must have really been tired, because when he awoke it was seven o’clock and dark outside. He recalled childhood naps like this one, lying beneath a mohair throw, waking up unsure of where he was. Mia lived in a studio, and across from him sat her futon—though he realized now it was their futon, the one they’d slept on in college. He’d gone right to sleep in her apartment. He’d been too tired to snoop, though he also felt it wasn’t his right to do so. He didn’t, in the end, want to know her secrets. It felt like enough of a secret that he was here.

“Are you feeling better?” Mia stood across from him, holding open a Zingerman’s shopping bag. “I got you some sandwiches,” she said. “And a cherry scone and a peanut butter cookie and a Key lime bar and some fresh-squeezed lemonade and a loaf of Parmesan-pepper bread.”

“You got me bread?”

She held up the loaf of bread. “Wasn’t Parmesan-pepper your favorite?”

He used to memorize the weekly bread schedule and show up at Zingerman’s when the Parmesan-pepper arrived. Then he would go home and make a sandwich for Mia and bring it to her office.

“I figured you’d have the leftovers when you got back to Iowa. Ply your classmates with them.”

They ate dinner together at her little dining room table facing the boxes of herbs on the windowsill: rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, chives. Out of necessity, she had begun to cook, and she thought of Julian as her inspiration, recalling how he’d started to cook when they got to Ann Arbor and had become quite good at it. And he was the one who had purchased the window boxes, who tended to the herbs back in their apartment on Kingsley, who, when she came home, could be seen with them lined up on the kitchen counter, happily conducting his experiments.

“So this is your home,” he said.

“It’s not exactly palatial.”

“No, but it has character. Everywhere you’ve lived has.”

She smiled at him.

“Why? Don’t you like it here?”

“I wouldn’t have minded a larger space, but the price is right.” She hesitated.

“What?”

“I was thinking about how when we moved to Ann Arbor you wanted us to live in a real house.”

“What’s wrong with a real house?”

“Nothing, but I was worried about money. And then you left me, Julian, and even our apartment on Kingsley was too expensive for me.”

“Is that why you thought money was tight? Because in the back of your mind you believed things might not work out?”

“No,” she said. Though it was true, she thought, that she’d never felt his money was hers. When they got married, he had wanted them to join checking accounts, but she refused at first. It took years for her to acclimate to having married someone rich, and those initial months in Ann Arbor she kept a secret log of everything she spent, trying, vainly, to live off her student stipend. “Anyway, I’ll be moving in July.”

“Where to?”

“New York.”

He laughed.

“What?”

“I thought you hated New York.”

The truth was she liked New York, but it had been hard to muster much enthusiasm for it when Julian was being so enthusiastic himself. Now she was the one moving there, while he, to her surprise, hadn’t returned. Was that, she wondered, the reason she’d chosen it? Because, no matter what happened, he might end up back there? No, she thought, she wouldn’t acknowledge it. She’d stopped waiting for him long ago.

She would be working at a clinic at NYU, she said, seeing patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Bosnian refugees, displaced Somalis, a few regular old traumatized Americans. She would do that for a couple of years; then she hoped to open a private practice. “It won’t be easy,” she said. “There are more therapists in Manhattan than in Vienna. But my adviser knows people in New York, so I should get some referrals. The University of Michigan casts a wide net.”

“Go Blue!” he said.

She smiled.