Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 4

  “Is that why you left prep school?”

  Carter shook his head. “In the end I adjusted. It’s always been that way. I suspect I’ll be adjusting for the rest of my life.”

  “Yet you went back home.”

  “That’s because the more successful I became at prep school, the more I felt like I was betraying my parents. I knew I’d end up hating where I came from. I already hated where I came from, but this was worse. I was becoming haughty.”

  “So you returned to California?”

  “And for a month my mother didn’t stop crying.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she wanted me to get the best education possible. I’ll tell you what my childhood was like, Wainwright. Vocabulary quizzes at the dinner table. Summers spent at Johns Hopkins in this program for the gifted. My mother was so committed to saving money for my education that she bought me reversible clothing. She figured she was getting two items for the price of one, but I refused to wear those clothes.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was off in his own world, attending to one of his get-rich-quick schemes.”

  “What does he do?”

  “A little of everything.” Carter described his father’s jobs, and these, he said, were just the ones he could recall. He’d been in the Laundromat business, the stationery business, the restaurant business, the liquor-transporting business, the furniture business, the grain-exporting business, and the pasta-making business. Finally, when Carter was in high school, his father settled into running a marginally profitable company called So Much Hot Air that took people for rides in hot air balloons over California’s Mount Tamalpais.

  “So Much Hot Air,” Julian said. “I like that. It’s clever.”

  “That’s the problem,” Carter said. “My father sits around trying to be clever instead of actually making a living. He dreams about becoming rich. I dream about becoming rich, too, but I’m going to do something about it.”

  “So that’s why you’re at to Graymont? To become rich?”

  “It’s as good a reason as any.” Carter looked up. “Graymont’s like prep school all over again. But then, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because if the kids at Graymont are rich, you, Wainwright, are the richest of all.” And with that wealth, Carter said, came an indifference to wealth that only the wealthy could afford, a sense of entitlement, and a way of being in the world that was utterly at ease. He might have been good at affecting indifference, but Julian’s indifference came as naturally to him as breath itself.

  “So you have me figured out,” Julian said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “You think I’m wrong?”

  Lying on his back, Julian watched his shadow move across the ceiling. “I’d like to meet your parents,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come out to visit California.”

  “Sure,” Carter said.

  But Julian knew it wouldn’t happen; Carter would make sure of it. Carter would no more invite him to California than he would invite him to Neptune.

  Carter’s breathing had steadied, and now, when Julian looked down from his bed, he saw Carter with his eyes closed, asleep.

  The first real snow of the year fell, and the students came out of the dorms for a snowball fight, freshmen and sophomores against juniors and seniors; but then the teams shifted, alliances were fluid, everyone was friend and foe. Julian pelted people and they pelted him back. Someone had taken Graymont and shaken it up; he felt as if he were living inside a snow globe.

  In town, he guided his dogs to where the path had been cleared, so the snow in Northington wouldn’t look like the snow in New York City, all sludge and mud and urine. Now that it had gotten colder, Mary, the Newfoundland, had gone into hibernation. She was consuming less meat, her metabolism had slowed, and Julian, standing in front of Mr. Kang’s grocery, fed the leftover scraps to the other dogs, letting them lick the juice from his fingers.

  Mr. Kang’s store was quiet, and soon Mrs. Kang had come outside and was making a snowman in front of the grocery. She had on a down coat and red wool mittens, but her head was uncovered, her hair loose. She put features on the snowman’s face: Brussels sprouts for the eyes, radishes for the ears, a carrot for the nose, and a snow pea for the mouth. Then she went inside to pack vegetables for Julian: a head of cauliflower, arugula, tomatoes on the vine, and purple kale, which he’d never tried before. He said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Kang and headed with his bag of vegetables slung over his shoulder back to campus.

  Perhaps, he thought, he should become a vegetarian. If he stopped eating meat, he’d eat more vegetables; he’d help Mr. Kang make a living. In the cafeteria, however, they were always serving bacon, and he loved bacon. What justification was there for eating bacon that wouldn’t also justify eating dog, eating Mary herself, and the thought of that sickened him. So he ate his bacon with a heavy heart, not getting as much pleasure from it as he normally did. He ate vegetables, too, more of them than usual, sitting in the cafeteria, trying to make it up to Mr. Kang, while outside the snow began to fall again in the courtyard.

  Suddenly Carter had met a girl. Her name was Pilar, which was, Julian had to admit, a sexy name—an appropriate name, Carter pointed out, because it was attached to a sexy person.

  Carter had met Pilar in the college dining hall. “At breakfast,” he said.

  Breakfast! The college boy’s forgotten meal! Why, Julian wondered, was he always skipping breakfast?

  “French toast,” Carter said sagely. “Next to the big trough of maple syrup.”

  “She was standing behind you in line?”

  “In front,” Carter said. “Ladling.”

  “Breakfast people are boneheads,” Julian said.

  “Not Pilar.”

  “What are you telling me? You asked her out on a date?”

  “Not a date.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’re going to hang out.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “In the dorms?”

  “At the bar.”

  “But it’s not a date?”

  “A date’s official.”

  “And this is?”

  “Unofficial.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it’s casual, Wainwright. It’s practically inadvertent.”

  The next night Carter showered, combed and mussed his hair, and prepared to leave for the Bison Bar and Grill where he would inadvertently run into Pilar and inadvertently hang out with her. In his jeans pocket he placed a roll of condoms in case, at the end of the night, they should inadvertently have sex.

  “You’re being presumptuous,” Julian said. “You act presumptuous with a girl and you end up hoist with your own petard.”

  “I’m not being presumptuous,” Carter said.

  “So let’s say you get lucky with this girl and she makes it known she wants to sleep with you. What do you do then?”

  “I take out my condoms.”

  “Mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Pilar, who yesterday you met for the first time, just a nice girl who likes maple syrup on her French toast, your fucking classmate, Heinz—Pilar sees you take out your condoms and she wants to know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you carry those condoms with you all the time or did you bring them just for her? Which means you’re in trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you brought them just for her, she thinks you think she’s easy, which means she won’t be easy, even if she really is.”

  “So I tell her I carry them with me all the time.”

  “Then she thinks you’re a slut.”

  “But I can’t be a slut,” Carter said. “I’m a guy.”

  It was a good non-date, Carter told Julian; he’d been having an excellent time hanging out with Pilar. But at the end of the night, perhaps because of his exuberance, or in
a chivalric rush to pick up the tab, he removed from his jeans pocket not just his wallet but the condoms as well, the spool of them cascading onto the table.

  “What did you do then?” Julian said.

  “I apologized,” said Carter. “It was the only thing I could think to do.”

  “And then?”

  “I invoked you.”

  “Me?”

  “I said you were my best friend and you warned me not to bring condoms. I told Pilar you were a cautious guy.”

  “You, on the other hand, throw caution to the wind.”

  Carter shrugged.

  “So that was it?” Julian said. “The date’s over?”

  Carter shook his head. Pilar, he explained, scooped up the condoms and placed them in her pocket. Then she walked over to the jukebox and put on a song. She was standing with her back to him, and her jeans were on so tight he could see the outline of his condoms through her back pocket.

  “So she’s torturing you,” Julian said.

  “You might say that.”

  “Well, you deserved it, Heinz.”

  Carter smiled. “So I’m sitting at the table nursing my beer, and Pilar comes over and drops the condoms in front of me. ‘Class is over,’ she says.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Carter smiled. “She was just fucking with me, Wainwright! Having a good time!”

  “And then?”

  “Then we left the bar.” As they walked up the hill, Carter told Julian, their arms touched. Then Pilar was resting her hand on his shoulder. Then she was taking him back to her dormitory.

  Soon Carter was staying at Pilar’s most nights, sleeping there with such regularity that, upon interrogation, he was forced to admit he kept an extra pair of tennis sneakers in her dorm room, and a toothbrush, too.

  “A toothbrush?” Julian said.

  “To brush my teeth with.”

  “I understand that.”

  Upon further interrogation, Carter acknowledged it wasn’t just a toothbrush and a pair of tennis sneakers he kept at Pilar’s, but underwear, socks, mouthwash, dental floss (since when had Carter become so preoccupied with his teeth?), a couple of novels for bedtime reading, a pair of track shoes (Pilar ran cross-country and she and Carter had started to run together), nail clippers, a few T-shirts, and a box of Q-tips.

  Worst of all, Carter and Pilar had bought a toaster oven together and they could be found late at night heating kippers in it.

  “So what are you telling me?” Julian said. “You got his-and-hers toaster ovens?”

  “Not his-and-hers. Just one.”

  Then the three of them went out together, and Julian understood why Carter was spending so much time with Pilar. Pilar wasn’t just a pretty girl who liked maple syrup on her French toast; she could talk about literature, for now she was engaging Carter and Julian in a discussion of Joseph Conrad.

  Then Carter and Pilar were talking about Julian, almost, it seemed, as if he weren’t there. “Julian thinks words are erotic,” Carter said.

  “Well, they are,” Pilar said. “At least they can be.”

  Emboldened, Julian explained to Pilar that there were certain words he liked. “Sullied,” for instance. And “jejune.”

  “‘Jejune’ is a good one,” Pilar said.

  “Or ‘pelt,’” Julian said. He liked “pelt” as both a noun and a verb.

  “Julian likes ‘sexual congress,’” Carter said.

  Julian shrugged. He couldn’t remember having told Carter this, but it was true; he liked “sexual congress.”

  Soon there came across the faces of Carter and Pilar incipient looks of distraction. There were repeated glances at watches. At eleven o’clock, there commenced between them an astonishing assortment of signals and tics, a kind of lovers’ Morse code. At eleven-fifteen, the yawning began.

  “Time to rock ’n’ roll,” Carter said.

  “You bet,” said Pilar.

  Was the sex really that good? Or was this just what happened when you found a girlfriend? You grew progressively more sleepy?

  It was worse than that, Julian discovered. Carter and Pilar wanted to get back to the dorms so they could watch Nightline.

  “Ted Koppel?” Julian said to Carter the next day. “How old are you, Heinz?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You’re nineteen years old and you’ve got your Ted Koppel and your his-and-hers toaster ovens. When did you become so domestic?”

  “What’s wrong with domestic?”

  Julian couldn’t answer him. He was domestic, too, if that meant waking up late and eating his meals in the dining hall, hanging out in the dorms watching sports on TV, playing poker with the guys in the room next door. He was jealous, that was the problem—jealous of Carter for having met Pilar, and jealous of Pilar, who now spent more time with Carter than Julian himself did.

  Julian and Carter had a game. They would sit with the freshman facebook and argue over who knew more of their classmates. Then Carter would decide he hated his classmates, at which point Julian realized he hated them, too. The facebook was dog-eared, especially page 47, where, in the upper right-hand corner, was a photograph of Mia Mendelsohn.

  Mia from Montreal, Julian called her.

  “She’s dreamy,” he said.

  “She would appear to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can never be sure until you actually see her.”

  In her photograph, Mia from Montreal had dark curly hair, and she wore round wire-rimmed glasses that gave her a look of contemplation. On her face there appeared the beginnings of a smile, and Julian thought he could make out a single dimple in her left cheek. “She’s for me,” he said.

  Then he saw her in person, at a party. The band was playing a song by the Police, but Mia from Montreal wasn’t dancing to the Police. She appeared to be dancing the rumba.

  “I spoke to her,” Carter said the following week. “Mia from Montreal!”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Not only that, I walked her across campus.”

  “Tell me she was going your way.”

  Carter admitted it: she was going his way.

  “She’s not your typical Canadian,” Carter said.

  And what, Julian wanted to know, was your typical Canadian? Carter had a theory about everything, and almost invariably that theory was false.

  “It’s the well-known phenomenon,” Carter said, “of the inferiority complex masquerading as the superiority complex. The obsessive focus on Canada? National health insurance, bilingualism, the Québécois?”

  “That’s what you talked about?” Julian said. “The Québécois?”

  “Actually, we didn’t even mention Canada.”

  Now Julian was confused.

  “Wainwright,” Carter said, “do you like ankle bracelets?”

  “Does she wear one?”

  Carter nodded.

  “Then I like them.”

  “What about stockings?”

  “Hate ’em.”

  “She does, too.”

  Where, Julian wondered, had they walked? To a department store?

  Carter said, “She’s got a nice figure, but she doesn’t flaunt it. It’s almost like she’s a girl who doesn’t have sex.”

  “A prude?”

  “More like a girl who’s saving herself.”

  “For what?”

  “That special someone.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Exactly. She’s not really saving herself. She only seems like she is.”

  “But why?”

  “Because she’s sophisticated. Mia from Montreal doesn’t call attention to her body. She’s hot by not being hot. That’s how the heat gets generated.”

  Julian saw her again, this time in the laundry room. He hoped she didn’t notice that next to him, clearly in his possession, was a package of fabric softener. He had a book of stories by Ernest Hemingway, and he placed the book on top of the fabric softener, to balance th
e picture out.

  Mia from Montreal sorted her clothes at her feet. There was a colors pile and a whites pile, and Julian thrust his face into his book so she wouldn’t think he was staring at her laundry.

  Periodically, though, he glanced at Mia herself, who was even more beautiful than he remembered. She was wearing blue jeans and a gray V-neck T-shirt, and her hair was up in a bun.

  “I think you know my friend Carter,” he said.

  Mia nodded. “Carter’s great.”

  “The very best,” Julian said. Then, wanting to make sure Mia didn’t take this literally—he, Julian, after all, was the very best—he mentioned Carter’s girlfriend, Pilar.

  A black bra strap stuck out from under Mia’s T-shirt, and she fingered it idly, then brushed a wisp of hair from in front of her face.

  “I saw you at this party,” Julian said. “You were dancing the rumba.”

  Mia laughed. “I used to dance in high school.”

  “The rumba?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you Cuban?”

  “Jewish.”

  “You can’t be both?”

  “I guess you can.” Mia peered through the window at her rotating clothes, giving the washer a baleful look as if her laundry disappointed her. “I was even religious briefly.”

  “Really?”

  “An Orthodox Jew, if you can imagine that.” Mia grabbed hold of a T-shirt and held it up to him, showing him the name tape sewn into the collar. “There I am,” she said. “Mia Mendelsohn.”

  “Are you related to Felix Mendelssohn?” Julian asked.

  Mia laughed. “I can’t even keep a tune. In Hebrew school, I had to sing in the Passover pageant and the teacher told me just to mouth the words.”

  “The Passover pageant?”

  “It’s like the Christmas pageant, but with the Ten Plagues. I was a locust.”