Matrimony (31 page)

He nodded. “How about you? Did you ever learn to eat fish?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then how am I going to host you in Japan?” Derek gave her his business card and he was off, his gaze focused on something in the sky, but all Mia could see was a flock of birds.

She cried out, “If Rodney comes to college here, have him look me up!”

“I will!” Derek said.

She ran after him. “Derek, I’m pregnant!”

She had no idea how she knew this. But two weeks later, when she took a pregnancy test, she barely had time to celebrate with Julian because she was already feeling nauseated. It usually took a month for morning sickness to set in, but with her it had been almost instantaneous.

Now, five months pregnant, at her college reunion, she found that nothing about her pregnancy had gone as she’d anticipated. She’d assumed she would be one of those trim pregnant women, someone with a little bump for a stomach, but she could see now that this wouldn’t be so: she’d already gained fifteen pounds, and much of it was in her face. She was famished all the time, yet the food she craved also repulsed her. And only in the past week, well after the end of her first trimester, had the nausea begun to subside. In these middle months—the most endurable trimester, everyone said—she was still so tired she often went to sleep as soon as she got home and didn’t wake up until the morning. What she felt, above all, was despondent; she was carrying something alien inside her. This must have been what postpartum depression felt like, only hers had arrived months early.

At particularly bad moments, she wondered why she’d wanted a baby at all. She’d always liked children, and she still looked forward to the holiday cards that arrived every year from her family in Aix; Claudette, unbelievably, was in university now; Emile would be starting next year. Some of her patients were children, and she enjoyed the play-acting and board games, a therapy through indirection that was altogether different from how she worked with adults. Yet when she tried to recapture what she’d felt just months ago, that instinctive, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce, it was as if she were remembering someone else. She recalled what it had been like for her mother to get sick, and she thought she had made the wrong decision. She should have had her ovaries removed. Then, if they wanted to, she and Julian could have adopted.

But there was nothing to do about that now. She lay in her underwear, perspiring, on the dormitory bed, and no matter how many times she showered she couldn’t get comfortable.

Other reunion classes had returned as well, but only the class of ’90 was treated to a special convocation by the president of Graymont, who, having taken office their freshman year, was now going back to teaching. “I came when you came and I leave when you return. I look out at you today from this podium, a hundred and eighty strong, and I’m proud to say I’ve watched you grow up.”

As if to disprove this, someone made a farting noise.

The president listed his accomplishments. He had doubled the endowment and overseen the creation of a Latino studies department and an African American studies department; a new library had been built; in the last five years, Graymont had graduated more Rhodes Scholars per capita than any other college in the country. “But this isn’t about me,” the president said. “This is about you.”

The students roared.

“Among you are lawyers, doctors, artists, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs. But I want to single out for special mention those students in the class of ’ninety who have, in good Graymont tradition, taken paths that are a little more offbeat.”

“Where’s Tuckahoe?” someone shouted. Cameron Tuckahoe had been the rumored baker of the hash brownies that had gotten the dean of admissions stoned.

“We have a former member of the United States Olympics Luge team,” the president said.

“God bless you, Baker!” someone called out.

Back in college, Ted Baker had prepared himself for the Olympics by leading his team to the gold medal in the Graymont Bong Olympics, which involved running up ten flights of stairs while stoned.

Soon the president finished speaking, and everyone dispersed across the quad. Julian greeted Michael Manheim, who fifteen years ago had come to graduation in a gorilla suit. (Jimmy Carter had gotten an honorary degree that day, and Michael had tried to place a wreath of bananas around the former president’s neck before being apprehended by the Secret Service.) Since then, whenever Julian thought of Michael he pictured a gorilla, so that now he was half startled to see him upright, looking every bit as human as the rest of the class.

“People expect me to have grown hair on my back,” Michael said. “And do you know what? I have.”

Julian wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.

“And on my shoulders and coming out of my ears.”

Or that.

Paisley McDonald was talking with Norman Stevens, and next to them was Astrid, from Professor Chesterfield’s class. Astrid had undergone a transformation since graduating from college. “I’m a ‘do-me’ feminist,” she kept saying, which meant, if Julian understood her, that she was a sex-loving feminist, not a sex-hating feminist.

A child zigzagged across the lawn, searching for her parents. According to the Class of ’90 Survey, sixty-eight percent of the class was married and fifty-six percent had children. People were swapping photos of their children, and Tom Monroe, who stood in the shadows of Christ Church talking to Alison Thompson and her husband, was passing around a photo not of his child but of a missing child from a milk carton—as a teenager, Tom had collected, as he liked to say, “the whole series”—which prompted Alison to say, “Tom, you’re sick.”

“Do you know who I am?” someone asked Julian. It was Cara Friedberg, from Professor Chesterfield’s class.

Julian shook Cara’s hand.

“I hope you don’t remember that story I wrote. The one about the girl breaking up with her boyfriend at the pizza joint?”

Julian admitted that he did.

“Anyway, I want you to know I’ve gotten a lot better. A story of mine is being published this fall.”

Soon Julian was off to say hello to other classmates. But quickly he tired of this, for no sooner had he exchanged a few sentences than he found he had little else to say; everyone gravitated toward a bland nostalgia. So he decamped to the other side of the quad, to wander around campus alone.

Outside Andrews Hall, he picked up a copy of
The Graymont Alumnus
and flipped to the Class Notes. The students who submitted to Class Notes were the same ones who in college, full of good cheer, could be seen walking backward across campus wearing the maroon ribbons given them by the admissions office and leading a tour of prospective college students. The world could be divided, Julian thought, between the people who submitted to Class Notes and the people who didn’t. A few members of his class had already died, and they were by and large people he’d liked. That was the way alumni bulletins worked. The people you disliked were accomplishing things, and the people you liked were dead.

The next morning, taking a break from activities, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Don’t say anything,” Carter said.

Julian was sitting under a tree, and he rose to greet Carter. “Well, this is a surprise. You weren’t on the list of people attending.”

“And if I had been, you probably wouldn’t have come yourself.” Carter was wearing a white T-shirt, chinos, and running sneakers, and he was sporting a couple of days’ growth of blond beard. He looked older, Julian thought, though Julian must have looked older, too; he hadn’t seen Carter in six years.

And there it was. Carter’s voice. The guy who could imitate a loon so well even the loons thought he was one of them.

“Anyway,” Carter said, “I’ve come back so you can spit in my face. Or punch me, if you’d prefer.”

“It’s too late,” Julian said.

“In that case, can I talk to you?”

Julian nodded.

“But not here, with all the glad-handing and back-slapping. I’ve never been to a reunion in my life, and it pains me to break my record.”

They passed Pickens Hall and McMillan Library, and now they stood looking up at the registrar’s office, where Mia had worked after graduation. “The funny thing is, I never thought of you as the reunion type, either.”

“I’m not,” Julian admitted. “But Mia and I met here. I’ve become nostalgic in my middle age.”

“Is that how you see yourself? Middle-aged?”

“A lot has happened.”

They stopped in front of the statue of Theodore Graymont, abolitionist hero and educational reformer, founder of the college in 1878. Freshman year, Carter climbed that statue and painted a Native American headdress on Theodore Graymont’s head while Julian snapped photos.

Now Julian asked Carter what he remembered about college.

“I remember getting drunk and vomiting at the foot of that statue. And I remember that Theodore Graymont had four children—Wendell, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Clarence—and two more who died at birth. At least, that’s what the tour guides said.”

They walked across the lawn past the president’s house. “President Vickers is retiring,” Julian said. “He gave a speech to us yesterday. He came when we came, he leaves when we return…”

“So he’s still an idiot.”

“Pretty much.”

Carter stopped walking. “I don’t want to do this.”

“What?”

“Shoot the shit. Not that you aren’t my favorite person to shoot the shit with. But that’s not why I came here.”

“Why
did
you come?”

“To apologize,” Carter said. “And to tell you how lucky I was to have you as a friend.”

“Heinz…”

“When I heard that you and Mia had separated, I fell into the worst funk, and I didn’t come out of it until you’d gotten back together.”

“So you’ve been keeping tabs on me.”

“I think about you every day,” Carter said. “I’ve had other friends over the years, good friends, mind you, but it’s not the same. I suspect it’s been ages since you’ve thought about me, and I’m not going to stand here beating my chest over something you probably don’t care about any longer.”

“I do care about it,” Julian said. Not the fact that Carter had slept with Mia. He’d let go of that, finally, when he returned to her; at a certain point it was time to move on. What he cared about was that Carter was here. And though he didn’t think about Carter every day, he thought about him, in fact, quite infrequently, he’d had to endeavor to reach that point. And seeing him again made Julian realize he
had
been thinking about Carter, even as he’d convinced himself he hadn’t been.

“I’m truly, truly sorry for what I did. I’m sorry, also, for having been such an asshole it makes me wonder why you were my friend.”

“Heinz, come on.”

“Seriously, have you ever met anyone with such a big chip on his shoulder?”

Julian laughed.

“What did I have to complain about? I got a scholarship to prep school and college. I graduated from an excellent law school, and before I was thirty I was handed seventeen million dollars just for showing up to work.”

“You should give yourself more credit.”

“I spent so much of my life feeling aggrieved I didn’t know what to do without my indignation.” He looked up at Julian. “Listen to me. I sound like I’ve been in therapy.”

“Have you been?”

“Sylvie—my girlfriend—convinced me to go into it.”

“And you’ve become a believer?”

“It’s worked for me. Or maybe I should say it’s working. What about you? Have you ever seen a therapist?”

“I see one every day,” Julian said. “And best of all, she doesn’t charge.”

“Mia?”

“It’s the women who save us from ourselves.”

Carter smiled. “So now I’m done,” he said. “If you want me to go, I’ll go.”

And when Julian didn’t say anything, when he made clear through his silence that he didn’t want Carter to go, Carter said, “Stay right there. I just have to tell Sylvie I’ll be a while longer.”

“She’s here?”

“We’re going camping in the Berkshires,” Carter said. “We decided to make a trip of it.”

Carter sprinted across the quad, and when he returned he and Julian walked farther through campus, past the sciences building and Danforth Gym, where they used to play basketball together. Freshman year, between games, Julian would practice his vertical leap in the hope that he could learn to dunk a basketball. He was six foot one, and at eighteen he’d been able to dunk a tennis ball, and he could do no better at twenty-one. Then began the slow process of diminishment. At thirty, with a running start, he could barely touch the rim, and now, at thirty-seven, he couldn’t even do that. He still played pickup a couple of times a week, but he kept spraining his ankle and twisting his knee. Someone seemed to be telling him to hang up his sneakers.

They stood now inside Thompson Hall, in the room where Professor Chesterfield had held his class. Carter sat down in one of the chairs. He placed his feet on the desk and closed his eyes, mimicking what he’d been like in college.

On the blackboard Julian wrote, “Thou shalt not confuse a short story with a Rubik’s Cube.”

“Chesterfield’s commandments,” Carter said.

“He’s gone,” said Julian.

“Retired?”

“Dead. You didn’t hear?”

Carter shook his head.

“I spoke to him a couple of months before he died. I was working at a literary agency, and he called to say he’d finished his novel. He wanted us to represent him.”

“Did you?”

“The book was terrible. Not the writing itself, which was more than adequate, but the characters. It was as if they’d lived as hermits for the last forty years, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Chesterfield had talent, but the book made me realize that it takes more than talent and it takes more than luck. Sometimes a writer’s personality gets in the way. Chesterfield wasn’t sufficiently self-aware, which I know can be said of all of us, but in his case it tanked his novel.”

“So you didn’t take him on?”

Julian shook his head. “What’s worse, my boss made me write the letter. You’d think I would get some perverse pleasure out of that. You know, toppling the father, and I’m a toppling-the-father kind of guy. But it made me sick. I thought my letter was going to kill him, but by the time it got to him he was already gone. He had a heart attack while sitting at his typewriter, at work on his next novel.”