Matrimony (26 page)

“Is Olivia still living there?”

She nodded. “That’s another reason I’m moving. I want to spend time with her.”

“Has she been dancing?”

“As much as she can.” Olivia had been an understudy with Mark Morris, and when someone from the troupe went down with an injury, she’d gotten to perform at BAM. Their father came in for the performance, and Mia flew in, too. But Olivia had been injured herself. In the last year alone, she’d separated her shoulder and blown out her knee.

“She’s five foot eight,” Mia said, “which is too big for a dancer. Too big for a dancer, she likes to say, and too small for a model. And not pretty enough for either.”

“She’s pretty,” Julian said.

“Of course she is, but she doesn’t see it. And now she’s going out with a married man. Kincaid’s fifteen years older than her, and he has a wife and three daughters. Does she really want to be involved with someone like that, out of all the guys in New York?”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“Of course I have, but she won’t take my advice.” Mia was in the kitchen now, and on the wall across from her hung a backward clock. The one read eleven and the eleven read one; left and right were reversed. It had been a gift from Olivia for her twenty-first birthday, and she’d kept it all this time, transporting it from apartment to apartment. “When you left me, Julian, Olivia started to call regularly for the first time in years. But in the end, she saw my splitting up with you as another example of my good fortune. Do you know why? Because at least we didn’t have kids. From the minute she was born, she’s thought of me as the lucky one, and whatever happens, she simply incorporates it into what she already believes.”

“She sounds like a philosopher,” Julian said. “Never let a fact get in the way of a theory.”

“So I’ve decided to stay quiet. I just watch her carry on her affair and fritter away her inheritance.”

“Is that what she’s doing? Frittering it away?”

“Spending it, yes.” Though Mia supposed “frittering it away” was uncharitable. Olivia gave dance lessons, and occasionally she still picked up waitressing shifts. But that wasn’t enough to support yourself in New York, and realistically, she wasn’t going to be dancing that much longer.

“And you?” Julian said. “Are you still sitting on your inheritance like it doesn’t exist?”

“It’s two hundred thousand dollars,” Mia said. “It’s not going to support me for a lifetime.”

“Right now, it sounds like it’s not supporting you at all.”

“You’re right. And here I am complaining my apartment is too small when I could have done something about it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“And you went along with me, Julian. Paying more of the bills when we split up, letting me convince us I was poor. I don’t want to spend the money for no good reason, but it’s as if there couldn’t be a good enough reason in the world.” She sat down on the couch. “This is crazy. We haven’t spoken in I don’t know how long, and all I can talk about is me, me, me. How are you, Julian? How’s your family?”

He hesitated.

“Is something wrong?”

“My parents have separated,” he said. “They’re getting divorced.”

“Oh, Julian.”

As a boy, Julian used to play Twister with his father. How anomalous it had been to see his father contorted like that, Saturday afternoons, the few hours when he wasn’t at work, and Julian knew he would have his father nearby as long as they were playing Twister together. Because his father wasn’t going to let him win. But as bullheaded as his father was, Julian was more so, and with each spin, his mother, the designated spinner, intoning her instructions, he knew he wouldn’t permit himself to fall and eventually, if he was steadfast, his father would capitulate. And when he did, when he tumbled to the mat, perspiring, his tie sweeping across the floor, he looked up at Julian still crouched on the mat and said, “I admire your stubbornness, son.”

And this was what his stubbornness had wrought. He’d gone off to Iowa City, a town with no draw for him, no history save for the history of the Writers’ Workshop, to classmates who saw themselves as his competitors and who left him no choice but to see them as competitors, too. He’d lost everything, everyone important to him. He’d lost Mia and he’d lost Carter, and now his parents were getting divorced and he’d lost them, too.

“Can I ask why they separated?”

“It wasn’t a happy marriage,” he said. “I figure they should have split up twenty-five years ago.” He wiped his face with a tissue, then forced out a laugh. Sugar tears: he was crying the remains of his Key lime bar. “When your mother was dying, Mia, I wished it was happening to my mother instead. Because, I thought, if it was my mother, sure, I’d be upset, but I didn’t think it would be so terrible. I was twenty-one. I thought I was done with her, and with my father, too.”

How little they’d known then, she thought. And not much more now. The way your parents could surprise you.

“You liked my parents,” he said, “didn’t you?”

It took her a while, she admitted, but her affection had grown for them. Julian’s mother, especially, had been a solace to her after her own mother died. Occasionally, the two of them would talk on the phone even when Julian wasn’t there. And then Julian left and she lost his parents, too. She recalled a spring afternoon, a few hours spent shopping with Julian’s mother, strolling along Madison Avenue. Her memories of shopping, the good ones, at least, always involved her mother. Men didn’t understand this, the intimacy you felt when shopping with your mother; she didn’t fully understand it herself. But she marked that as a time when things opened up between her and Julian’s mother, when she felt more welcomed by his family, and she felt more welcoming herself.

She looked up at the clock. “It’s almost ten,” she said. “I don’t want you driving through the night.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You can sleep on my couch. You’ve already staked a claim to it.”

She flipped on the TV, and they sat in front of it watching but not really, letting the sounds sweep over them.

“Did your parents really keep the TV in the closet?”

She nodded. The status quo ante, she thought. She could hear her father’s voice, see him fiddling with the antenna he’d made from that clothes hanger.

“I thought of calling you on your birthday,” he said. He’d been born at four-fifteen in the morning, and every year on his birthday his parents used to wake him up in the middle of the night so they could sing “Happy Birthday” at the moment he was born. He’d worked at Bennigan’s one summer on Cape Cod, and when it was a customer’s birthday he would bring out a piece of cake with a single candle on it and the waiters would sing the Bennigan’s song. “Happy, happy birthday, may all your dreams come true. Happy, happy birthday from Bennigan’s to you.” It was the same song he’d sung to Mia every year on her birthday.

“Why didn’t you?”

He didn’t know. Pride, he imagined. Or fear. The conviction that he’d end up in her apartment, which was where he’d ended up anyway.

That night, he slept on the couch still wearing his clothes, and Mia was on the futon, in her clothes, too. He’d fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing, and he didn’t even notice that they’d left the TV on.

When he awoke the next morning, she was at his side, holding orange juice and toast with marmalade.

“Are you just going to keep feeding me?”

“Isn’t that what a hostess is supposed to do?”

He leaned over and kissed her. He was still lying on the couch and she was sitting next to him, and now, when they separated, the toast was stuck to her elbow and marmalade was smeared across his brow.

She stood up, and he did, too, and they kissed again, without the acrobatics.

“Does this mean you’ll consider taking me back?” He tried to sound offhand, but his heart was thrashing against his rib cage and he didn’t know what she would say. You left someone you loved, and eventually they stopped loving you back. For all he knew, she had a boyfriend.

“Do you want to spend the day with me?”

“I could be your research assistant,” he said. “I’ll check your footnotes for you.”

“And after today?”

“I’ll find another task.”

She made a show of considering it. He had forced her to wait this long; she was going to make him wait a little longer. There was still more to talk about, in any case. Not that she had any doubt.

She had her coat on and she was out the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To the library,” she said. She was already down Fountain Street and he was following her, doing his best to keep up.

New York, New York

It was a gigantic building,
thrust above the East River, and at the Sixty-eighth Street entrance, where Mia went in, the taxis were navigating around the parked cars and the people in line waiting for the valet. At the information desk, she asked for the Greenberg Pavilion and was directed through a doorway and down a hall to a bank of elevators next to which hung an enormous portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg staring down at passersby.

She checked her reflection in the elevator doors. She was late. She had taken the express train uptown, and since the local hadn’t been waiting at Fifty-ninth Street, she had decided to walk from there. On days when the weather was good, she ran on the paved path between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, heading north from the West Village, past the meatpacking district and Chelsea and up beyond the turnoff to the Lincoln Tunnel. Other times, she ran on the city streets themselves. Twenty blocks to a mile, everyone said; the taxi meters confirmed it. But the avenue blocks, going west to east, were four times as long. Third Avenue, Second Avenue, First Avenue, York Avenue, the East River: this was a mile in its own right. She could have run, but she was in her work pumps and a skirt, carrying her bag, and she didn’t want to be perspiring when she arrived—though, having walked at a brisk clip, she was, anyway. It was warm, besides, unusually so for April. She removed her sunglasses and placed them in her bag.

In the waiting room, she flipped through
Us Weekly.
This was the second time in a week that she’d read
Us,
for a just few days ago Julian had brought home a copy someone had left on the subway and deposited it in the magazine bin in their bathroom. She had never read
Us
before, and what she’d wanted to know, leafing through it, was whether
Us
was more like
People
or like the
National Enquirer.
What she meant, she told Julian, was did it pay lip service to the truth, however much it traded in gossip and innuendo, or did it disregard the truth, like the
National Enquirer,
which reportedly had a large budget reserved for libel settlements?

“The truth,” Julian snorted. He was working as the assistant to a literary agent. He read the slush pile, passing on the promising material to his boss; he answered the phone, mailed contracts to authors, helped with first serial and subsidiary rights, and fed Lulu, the office cat, who spent most of her day asleep on the boss’s desk square in the middle of a pile of manuscripts. Julian’s boss knew he wrote fiction, and though she was partial to fiction herself—she represented a number of accomplished novelists—what editors were looking for, she told Julian despairingly, was the truth.

But whose truth? The truth of that reporter who’d been let go by the
Times
? The truth of George Bush? Of the Gulf War? The publishing world was in the midst of a memoir craze, and many memoirs crossed Julian’s desk. The people who wrote them had led exquisitely painful lives, but this didn’t automatically make them writers. “I suffer, therefore I am,” Professor Chesterfield had said, and it remained true more than fifteen years later. At Iowa, one of Julian’s instructors had complained about passive protagonists to whom bad things happen and who remain inert throughout the story, never making a choice, never
doing
anything, and so they lack moral complexity. Richard Nixon stories, Julian’s instructor called them. Mistakes were made. But who made these mistakes? Who was responsible? Such were the manuscripts Julian read at the agency and brought home at night, occasionally reading a few lines aloud to Mia.

Mia went into the bathroom, careful not to upset the urine samples. When she emerged, the receptionist gave her some forms to fill out.

“Is this your first time here?”

It was.

Her medical history was unexceptional, and so she put check mark after check mark in the “No” box, feeling a palpitation nonetheless. She signed her signature at the bottom, releasing the doctor from responsibility for things she wasn’t sure doctors should be released from, but now wasn’t the time to argue. “You don’t accept insurance, do you?”

They didn’t. But the receptionist agreed to take Mia’s insurance card anyway. Perhaps her insurance company would offer her partial reimbursement for services administered out-of-network.

“Is there a water fountain here?”

She was pointed to one.

Her tongue was dry, her throat parched. She drank lengthily, and almost as soon as she was done she needed to pee again.

Out the window, she glimpsed a narrow swatch of the East River. Bedpan Alley, this part of the city was called; along York Avenue everyone seemed to be wearing a white coat, a photo ID clipped to their breast pocket. Ambulances patrolled the streets, their lights flaring, a siren going on and off. Just last week a doctor had been mown down by an ambulance. Killed in the line of duty. Memorial Sloan-Kettering was a few blocks away, and the Hospital for Special Surgery. And New York Presbyterian, where Mia was now. Although she was
at
the hospital, she wasn’t
in
the hospital, she reminded herself. She was just here for a doctor’s appointment.

Across from her a woman, perhaps seven months pregnant, was drinking a smoothie, and a few seats away sat another pregnant woman, reading a fashion magazine. A coincidence, Mia thought, before she realized, rebuking herself, that of course it wasn’t a coincidence; she was in the waiting room for ob/gyn. A girl in her late teens emerged crying from the office, followed by a boy roughly the same age. A technician walked purposefully past them, carrying vials of blood down the hall. On the table next to Mia lay a stack of pamphlets with the words
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
written across the cover. One of the pamphlets was about chlamydia, another about AIDS. A nurse emerged and called someone’s name, and Mia, anticipating, stood up, but it was another patient being asked to come in.

She turned the pages of
Us
with dutiful solemnity. She and Julian lived in the West Village, home to many of New York’s movie stars, and just last week, when they were out to dinner, Matthew Broderick had been sitting at the table across from them, and it took Mia several moments to realize who he was. She had never thought of herself as out of touch with popular culture, but she was beginning to wonder whether this was so. The joke back in graduate school had been that there was no point in therapists’ going to the movies because their patients had already ruined the endings for them. But Mia was finding she had a different problem. She hadn’t heard of many of the actors her patients mentioned. A friend of hers read
People
cover to cover every week. It was her version of pornography, her friend said, but flipping through
Us,
reading the tales of heartbreak and betrayal, of divorce and weight gain and plastic surgery and palimony, Mia was less aroused than bored, and so she put the magazine away.

She looked out the window, past the East River to Queens. She’d been to Queens a few times recently, out to dinner in Astoria, Flushing, and Jackson Heights, but the borough still bewildered her. Sixty-fifth Street next to Sixty-fifth Avenue next to Sixty-fifth Place: it took a cartographer to understand Queens. Besides, she was still discovering Manhattan. She’d been living in New York for three years now, but she still approached it with the glow of a newcomer; she was glad to see she hadn’t used it up.

That last semester in Ann Arbor, she’d finally abandoned hope that Julian would return to her, and then he was there, sharing her tiny apartment with her. She’d been planning to stay with Olivia in New York, but Olivia didn’t have room for both her and Julian, so while Mia finished her dissertation, Julian flew to the city to check out rentals. My own private real estate agent, she called him.

When Julian first said he was joining her in New York, she assumed he was taking a leave of absence from graduate school, but he quickly made clear that he was dropping out. “It’s what I’ve wanted to do from the moment I got there.”

After a week in Ann Arbor, Julian returned to Iowa and left a rent check for his landlady; he didn’t even consider asking for his security deposit back. Then, having collected his belongings, he stopped by Henry’s house to say goodbye.

“So this is it?” Henry said. “A semester and a half is enough for you?”

“Life calls.”

“It’s probably for the best. It wasn’t pretty in workshop last week.”

Julian had forgotten. When his mother had called to say his father had left her, he’d departed Iowa City without telling anyone, and he was up in workshop the following week. Apparently, the class had discussed his story anyway. “They acted as if you were there,” Henry said.

“Which is just the reverse of what they usually do,” Julian said. “Most of the time, they pretend you’re not there even when you are.”

Henry smiled.

“So they hanged me in effigy?”

“Pretty much.”

“It’s to be expected, I guess.”

“Don’t worry,” Henry said. “You’ll have the last laugh.”

“You will too, Henry. I’m counting on you.”

It was late August when Julian and Mia moved to New York, just weeks before the Twin Towers fell. Welcome to New York City, Mia thought. Someone else might have turned around and left, but if anything, the attacks drew her closer. She and Julian were leaving for work when the planes blew up, and from in front of their apartment building they could see the smoke and hear sirens. In the days and weeks afterward, Mia walked around the city, stupefied. She and Julian volunteered at a shelter a few blocks from where they lived, and they brought pizzas late at night to the Ground Zero workers. Standing in the midst of it all, she felt that she was already an official resident, that she’d been placed on the fast track to becoming a New Yorker.

“At least it can’t get any worse,” Julian said.

He was right—though, a month later, Mia was standing on a crowded subway platform when suddenly everyone began to run for the exits. Did somebody have a gun? A bomb? She ran along the platform and up the stairs, but when she got outside and asked people what had happened, no one seemed to know. She scoured the newspapers the next day and couldn’t find anything. It must have been a false alarm. A case of spontaneous panic. She never would find out.

In the weeks after that incident, she started to walk more, and to run on the streets, for running, she found, was her preferred mode of transport. She would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, her own internal taxi meter clicking, glancing up at the Flatiron and Puck Buildings, discovering a city that now felt like hers.

She had spent that first year working at the clinic at NYU, treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder (now there were the Ground Zero workers to attend to as well), and then, as she’d planned, she opened a private practice. And maybe it was true that there were more therapists in Manhattan than in Vienna, but there were more patients as well. She came home one night and said to Julian, “You know what? I’m supporting myself.”

“Hell,” Julian said, “you’re supporting me.”

But it was because Julian was rich that, once the lease on their apartment ran out, they were able to purchase a brownstone on Perry Street, a couple of blocks from where they lived. “Let’s buy a building,” Julian said, and that word, “building,” seemed right to Mia, for he might as well have said, “Let’s buy the Chrysler Building,” owning a home was that foreign to her.

It had been a year now since they’d bought their brownstone, but Mia still liked to recall the day they moved in, Julian upstairs propping the doors open, the movers, an Israeli and two Mexicans, at her side, communicating in a medley of Hebrew and Spanish. Across the street stood the bakery she’d soon be getting coffee from. Everything that surrounded her felt like props that had been erected solely for the enactment of her new life. All that had happened until now had been simply a prelude.

Then the movers were gone, and it was just her and Julian amid the piles of boxes and the furniture in bubble wrap. “This is our home,” she said.

Julian smiled.

“Our home, our home, our home, our home.” She couldn’t recall having been this happy.

Yet in the months that followed, she kept waiting for something to go wrong, and now, sitting at the doctor’s office, she was convinced it had. A girl of about fourteen entered the waiting room, her mother at her side. Mia recognized the look on the girl’s face, for when she herself had been that age she’d visited the gynecologist for the first time, and though she couldn’t have imagined going on her own, it seemed even worse to be accompanied by her mother. She had a boyfriend at the time; they wouldn’t have sex for another year, but she was fitted for a diaphragm that day. At heart, her mother was a prude, but she had considered it her duty not to be one, and so she’d gone out of her way to be open about sex with Mia. Though Mia hadn’t wanted to talk about it with her. To this day, she felt that sex was about separation from your parents, and she thought that if she ever had a daughter she would spare her the talks her mother had given her, the effort she’d made to appear liberal and broad-minded, the copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
that had appeared at her bedside the day she turned fifteen.

In the examining room, she was given a gown and told to undress. “How are you today?” the nurse said.

Mia, dreading the companionship of strangers, did her best to be polite while hoping to discourage further exchange. “I’m fine,” she said, though the truth was she’d been agitated all day, sufficiently so that she’d contemplated canceling her therapy sessions. She hadn’t, because she believed doing so was irresponsible and she prided herself on not missing appointments. Besides, she thought seeing patients would distract her. But it hadn’t in the end.

The nurse removed the blood pressure kit. She was big-boned and stout, a redhead of about forty-five who had the bustling, efficient manner of the competent. She rolled up Mia’s sleeve.

“Will we be doing it here?”