Matrimony

by Joshua Henkin

  “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.

  In Friendship,

  Takeshi (Derek)

  A son, Mia thought. So he’d gotten married. Why did this surprise her? She couldn’t have expected him to wait around, when she’d given him no reason to do so, when, at eighteen, she’d barely let him kiss her, when he was living in Japan, a country she’d never been to, when she hadn’t been in touch with him for years. Vainly she thought, Come visit me, Derek. Oh, Derek, take me back. Walking along State Street she started to cry, and she was still crying when she ran into Julian.

  “Mia, are you all right?”

  Then she realized that the blond woman standing next to him, the woman who had just stopped laughing at something he said, was Trilby. His ex-student, and he was sleeping with her: it was so obvious they might as well have announced it.

  “Is something wrong?”

  But she didn’t answer him. She just ran across the diag, continuing to cry, until she was out on East University.

  Iowa City, Iowa

  “Do you have your paint roller?” Henry asked.

  Julian shook his head. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to bring one.”

  Henry stepped inside the house, and when he returned he was holding a large box of tools out of which he produced a paint roller.

  “Overalls,” he said, checking Julian out. “Last night I wouldn’t have imagined you in this getup, but in the clear light of day you look like a real farmer.”

  “I fig
ured I’d wear something I wouldn’t mind getting dirty. I’m telling you, I’ve never painted a house before.”

  “It’s easy,” Henry said. “You just dip the roller into the paint and apply it.”

  Julian shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Julian didn’t really know Henry, but then he didn’t really know anyone in town yet; he’d been here only three weeks. Yesterday afternoon, he and Henry had been up in workshop together, and they’d both been eviscerated. Yet Julian had liked Henry’s story, and he figured if the class could be wrong about Henry, they could be wrong about him, too. And this was how a friendship had started. Your enemy’s enemy was your friend.

  Henry was thirty-one, which made him almost Julian’s age, whereas much of the first-year class had only recently graduated from college. And Henry was a doctor. He’d been a surgery resident (“You think workshop was bad? You should see what assholes surgeons can be”) and he’d been headed for life as a surgeon when he decided if he didn’t pursue what he loved he’d never forgive himself. So he left his job in San Francisco and applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was another thing Julian admired about Henry; he’d given up something in order to come here, whereas most of their classmates had given up nothing. Julian liked Henry, besides, liked the fact that he was painting his landlady’s house, which he thought bespoke humility. But Henry said he didn’t see it that way. He was trying to save money (his landlady was cutting him a deal on the rent), and painting houses was physical and he enjoyed physical things; he’d already conscripted Julian to play tennis with him.

  Henry stood on the top rung of a ladder, pressing his paint roller against the house. Julian stood on a ladder, too. They were painting the back of the house, and then, when they were finished, they would move around to the front.

  “Workshop got pretty ad hominem,” Henry admitted. “When the stakes are low, the fangs come out.”

  In his written comments, the instructor had made clear how much he liked Julian’s story, but in class he’d been less forthcoming, and he’d done nothing to intervene when the discussion turned spiteful. He simply sat there as if enjoying the display, curious to see how tough Julian was.

  So this was Iowa, Julian thought. Though he understood there might be special animus toward him and Henry. Henry already had a literary agent, and Julian had recently published a short story in Harper’s. He’d also been featured over the summer in The Village Voice’s “Up-and-Coming Fiction Writers” special. He and seven other young writers had been flown to New York, where they posed for photographs on the steps of the New York Public Library and were asked questions about their writing habits and their literary influences. There was no way to answer such questions without sounding like a pompous ass, and Julian hadn’t acquitted himself any better than the others had. This had been made clear to him when, just days after his arrival, he learned that two of his new classmates had hung his photograph from the Voice above their mantel and were lobbing darts at it.

  Now they’d exacted their revenge.

  Henry said, “So are you depressed?”

  “My depression is so deep I can’t begin to describe it. And workshop is the least of it.”

  “Let me guess,” Henry said. “Female trouble?”

  Julian nodded. “Female trouble” was the phrase Julian’s grandmother had used to describe menstruation. Though that wasn’t what Julian had in mind right now. It had been over a year since he and Mia had split up. Fifteen and a half months, to be precise. There would come a day, he hoped, when he wouldn’t mark time by how long they’d been separated, but he was beginning to wonder if that would ever happen. He hadn’t wanted them to communicate—he found speaking with her too painful—though he’d sent her his contact information in case she needed to reach him. He hadn’t brought up divorce and neither had she, though that, he understood, was the next step. There was common-law marriage, where a couple lived together for so long they were considered married. He, on the other hand, could see himself heading toward a common-law divorce. He imagined himself at fifty, perhaps not even knowing where Mia lived, still with his marriage license secreted in some drawer, still, despite his best efforts, in love with her.

  “I know what you mean,” Henry said. “My girlfriend’s back in San Francisco. If I’d stayed there, we’d still be together.”

  “She didn’t want to move here?”

  “She would have if I’d asked her to. But I couldn’t get myself to do it. What if she didn’t like it here? Hell, I’m not sure I like it here. So we decided to leave things open. You know what leaving things open means? It means you’re broken up by Thanksgiving.” Henry put down his paint roller. “I don’t know what I’m doing in this place. Do I really need to be in another writing workshop?”

  Julian wasn’t sure what he was doing here, either. In fact, if one thing appeared to unify his classmates it was that already, after three weeks, everyone seemed to wonder why they had come to Iowa.

  Julian leaned his hands against the ladder, looking at Iowa City from where he stood, at the clusters of wood houses set back from campus. Henry lived on Fairchild Street, and Julian on Gilbert. All these street names he still had to learn, another town to discover. How random for the Writers’ Workshop to be in Iowa; how, he wondered, had it ended up here? Though there was cachet, he understood, in moving to a town you wouldn’t otherwise have lived in. Off to the hinterland. A kind of snobbery in reverse.

  But it wasn’t snobbery that had brought him here. It was the fact that he needed to get out of Ann Arbor. On his fifth anniversary of teaching, when a friend jokingly bought him a cake, he went directly to the composition office and handed in his resignation. It had been three months at the time since he and Mia had separated, and he hadn’t written another word of his novel. “Lost your muse?” someone said, and he nodded, though that didn’t really capture it. He thought he had writer’s block, but then he sat down and wrote a short story, and he finished it in three weeks. He finished another one a month later. That was the story he’d published in Harper’s, and while he was proofreading the galleys, his editor, learning of his predicament, suggested he consider going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she herself had gone.

  At first the idea struck him as absurd. Going to graduate school, doing more of what he’d done in college, with classmates just out of college themselves, had the sordid aspect of returning to junior high school. It wasn’t that he thought he had nothing to learn. He just didn’t think he had much to learn from graduate school, especially a graduate school as competitive as Iowa. (“There’s nothing to do there,” someone once told him, “except be mean to each other.”) Some people went to Iowa to make connections, but he had grown up in New York and was already connected. Besides, he wasn’t interested in making connections. This was a species of arrogance, he understood: he believed the connections should come to him.

  And in a way, they had. For his editor at Harper’s had called the director of the Writers’ Workshop and told him to look out for Julian’s application. And Julian, who hadn’t yet decided to apply, finally agreed to do so. He couldn’t have been working on his novel any less than he already was. And Ann Arbor was where he’d settled because of Mia; he needed to move somewhere else.

  That was how he’d ended up where he was now, on a ladder next to Henry, two of the twenty-five chosen, painting Henry’s landlady’s house. Henry had a broad, open face and features that suggested curiosity; his hair was thinning, and it was so blond you could see his pink scalp beneath it. “That’s why I wear a baseball cap,” Henry explained. “I’ve never met anyone who burns as easily as I do. And my father’s a dermatologist, so he’d kill me. He already wants to kill me just for coming here.”

  “Let me guess,” Julian said. “He thought being a surgeon was a better idea.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Henry rested his baseball cap on the roof. A ribbon of sweat traversed the inside of the cap, where his forehead had been. “How about
your parents? Do they wish you were doing something else?”

  Julian laughed. “They don’t have a problem with the Iowa part. My father thinks I’ve finally gotten into Yale.”

  Down Fairchild Street, Julian could see someone from the Writers’ Workshop making her way toward campus. She was a second-year student; he recognized her from an orientation event at the English and Philosophy Building, or maybe from one of the happy hours. The University of Iowa was a big school, but it was a good deal smaller than the University of Michigan, and here, at the Writers’ Workshop, the MFA students stayed to themselves. You could find them at the Mill or the Foxhead or Prairie Lights Bookstore, but in the end, there were only so many places to go searching for them.

  Julian had gotten paint on his overalls, and on his shirt, too. Henry was speckled and spattered himself, and the house appeared no better. It looked as if a gigantic ice cream cone had dripped down the side of it.

  “You better hope your landlady doesn’t show up now.”

  Henry dipped his paint roller into the can and tossed some paint against the wall. “It’s a lot like writing,” he said. “You get it all down on the page and then attend to the mess.”

  Julian had once heard an analogy made between writing and architecture. You had to lay down the foundation before you focused on the molding. But he went about things differently. He revised as he went along. Every sentence had to be right before he moved on to the next one because each sentence grew organically from the one that preceded it. For him, the foundation was the molding.

  “It’s like the potter at his wheel,” Henry said. “Throw down the clay and let it spin.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a potter, too.”

  Henry shook his head. “It’s just what I’ve heard.” He descended the ladder and dropped his paintbrush to the ground. “Should we call it quits?”

  Julian nodded.

  On the porch, Henry handed Julian a glass of iced tea. He served them each a tuna fish sandwich, and then, having finished off the iced tea, he removed from the fridge a couple of bottles of beer. He popped open a bag of potato chips, the hiss of air diffusing across the porch. “Where are you from originally?”