Matrimony (2 page)

“What are you talking about?” Astrid said.

“Here,” said Professor Chesterfield, “is a representative smattering of student dialogue: ‘Hello, how are you, I’m Bill, I’m Ted, nice to meet you, nice to meet you, too, shall we go to the theater, what street is it on, I’ll be there at seven-thirty on the northwest corner, see you there, pronto.’ Ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you, turn off your tape recorders. If your characters need salt, just give it to them. Don’t make them have a discussion about it.”

“Never?” said Rufus, whose characters liked to have discussions about everything.

“So,” said Professor Chesterfield, “when might a character reasonably say, ‘Could you please pass the salt’?”

Julian raised his hand. “If it characterizes him. Say you tell me your father just died, and I say, ‘Could you please pass the salt?’ It shows I’m not listening to you.”

“And you are?”

“Julian Wainwright.”

“Congratulations, Wainwright, you win!”

“Quadriplegic,” said Carter Heinz, who was sitting languidly in the back of the classroom, his feet propped on his desk.

“Pardon me?” said Professor Chesterfield.

Carter had a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes so it was hard to tell whether he was awake or asleep. He wore a look of aloofness and superiority, which attracted Julian, who was hoping to appear aloof and superior himself. “Let’s say you’re a cripple,” Carter said. “Paralyzed from the neck down. So I say to you, ‘Could you please pass the salt?’”

Professor Chesterfield began to laugh. Slowly, his laughter built until the classroom vibrated. “That’s the most brilliant thing anyone has said all year.”

The year was all of thirty minutes old.

Now it was time for the in-class writing exercise. Professor Chesterfield asked the students to describe a greasy spoon, first from the perspective of someone angry and then from the perspective of someone lovelorn. No mention was to be made of anger or lovelornness; the descriptions themselves were to do the work.

“A real-life greasy spoon?” Astrid said. “Like Denny’s?”

“Or IHOP?” Rufus said.

For the next half hour Professor Chesterfield sat unflinching on his desk as if he’d been cast in plaster; he looked scarily dead. Finally, his features thawed and he collected the students’ exercises and began to read them. But no sooner did he pick one up than he appeared to tire of it and he moved on to the next one. He laid the exercises across his desk like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

“What does ‘lovelorn’ mean, anyway?” someone asked.

“It’s when you love someone,” Rufus said, “and they don’t love you back.” There was a longing, dolorous tone to Rufus’s voice. He appeared to be speaking from experience.

Professor Chesterfield read from Sue Persimmon’s exercise. Sue was blond and full-figured, and she was staring raptly at Professor Chesterfield, but she had written, literally, about a greasy spoon and only now had she realized her mistake.

“‘The spoon was very greasy,’” Professor Chesterfield read. “‘Megan didn’t want to eat from a spoon that had so much gunk on it.’”

Professor Chesterfield read from Rufus’s exercise. “‘Bill picked up his fork and knife, looked warily around him, and cut into his collared greens.’ Rufus,” Professor Chesterfield said, “kindly undress your vegetables.”

Professor Chesterfield read from another exercise. “‘Tom’s French toast stared back at him, uncomfortable, indignant.’ What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a piece of indignant French toast. I’ve never seen one of those before, but then it’s a new year.”

The students looked up mutely.

“Class dismissed,” Professor Chesterfield said. He motioned to Julian and Carter to stay behind. “I like you guys,” he said. “You’re the only two students in the class with even an ounce of talent. Not that you have much of it.”

“No, sir,” Julian said.

“Are you two friends?”

“Don’t know him,” Carter said.

“Well, you should get to know each other.”

Outside the classroom Julian read through his exercise. Professor Chesterfield had written one word on it. “Sophomoric.” On Carter’s exercise there was one word, too. “Pusillanimous.”

“Jesus,” Julian said.

“Well, fuck,” said Carter, and he crumpled up his exercise and fired it across the hallway, where it landed in the trash can.

The next morning in the courtyard Julian saw Carter leaning indolently against a tree. Julian was tall and thin, with straight dark hair that fell across his face. Carter was squatter and more compact, but he held himself in such a way as to make a person think he had no shape at all. He had short-cropped blond hair and a tiny scar above his upper lip.

“So we’re supposed to be friends,” Julian said.

“Papal decree,” said Carter.

“‘Sophomoric’ and ‘pusillanimous.’ Do you know what those words mean?”

“They mean Chesterfield thinks we suck.”

“Actually, he likes us,” Julian said. “Why else would he bother to criticize us? You heard what he said. The only two students with any talent.”

“He said we didn’t have much of it.”

“But more than anyone else.”

They walked across campus, and outside the student union whom should they see sitting on a park bench wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat but Professor Chesterfield himself. “Hello, Heinz. Hello, Wainwright.”

The next evening they saw him again, outside the Bison Bar and Grill. Professor Chesterfield was wearing another hat, this one made of felt, and he tipped it at them in greeting. “Well, hello,” he said, and disappeared inside.

At Safeway the following afternoon they found him bent over the frozen food examining the turkeys. His cart was filled with a quart of skimmed milk, a head of lettuce, a tomato, and twenty, maybe thirty cans of cat food.

“The man has a cat,” Julian said.

“I doubt it,” said Carter.

“Then why’s he buying cat food?”

“Who knows?”

They spotted him the next day in the English department where he emerged from his office followed by Sue Persimmon. Sue looked every bit as pretty as she had in class, except now she appeared tousled, as did Professor Chesterfield. Professor Chesterfield went jauntily up the stairs, taking them two at a time, blond, sloe-eyed Sue Persimmon in her white sundress and silver anklet trailing amiably behind him.

“I bet they’re having an affair,” Julian said.

“How’s that possible?” said Carter. “The semester’s just begun.”

“Maybe he works fast.”

They saw him yet again, this time at the gym, where Professor Chesterfield was holding his own in what appeared to be the over-forty game of pickup basketball. He was surprisingly agile-footed. He had a dead eye from the outside and he played exuberant, harassing defense; no one wanted to be guarded by him.

The next week, however, he limped into class with a cane.

“What happened to you?” Astrid said.

Professor Chesterfield hoisted himself onto his desk and removed a dog muzzle from his briefcase. “Some rules.” There was, he explained, an almost unbearable urge on the part of the student writer to explain his short story as the class discussed it. This wasn’t to be permitted in his classroom. “Someday, when your stories are published in
The New Yorker
”—a ludicrously gigantic smile crossed Professor Chesterfield’s face, as if the thought of his students being published in
The New Yorker
were too outrageous to entertain—“you won’t be able to stand over your reader’s shoulder and tell him what you meant. For that reason, the writer won’t speak until after his story has been discussed.”

In many writing classes, the students sat in a circle and the professor guided them as they expressed themselves. But this wasn’t, Professor Chesterfield said, how he conducted things. His students spent their whole lives expressing themselves, through word and deed, and in his classroom, at least, a moratorium would be placed on expressing oneself.

Professor Chesterfield read from Cara Friedberg’s story, which was called “The Great Tragedy.” At the beginning of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. In the middle of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. At the end of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. Twenty-three pages of breaking up with your boyfriend at a pizza joint, and then there was a twenty-fourth page on which the young woman, ruing her decision to break up with her boyfriend, goes back to find him. Regrettably, her boyfriend has departed, and in her frenzied search for him she gets mown down by a bus. The young woman is dead; where can the story go? Nowhere, not least because the story has been written in first-person. But it goes on anyway, for one final sentence, in a magical stroke of narrative reincarnation: “I lay there cold and lifeless in Sean’s arms; rigor mortis had started to set in.”

“Karen Friedman,” Rufus said, already breaking Professor Chesterfield’s rule against expressing himself. He was referring to Cara’s protagonist. “It’s pretty close to Cara Friedberg, don’t you think?”

“Does this matter?” Over the years, Professor Chesterfield pointed out, his students focused on the smallest, least crucial details and ignored everything else.

“I find the story unbelievable,” Astrid said.

Julian nodded. He found many things unbelievable about the story, not least the climactic bus accident.

“I like the last sentence,” Rufus said. He read it aloud. “‘I lay there cold and lifeless in Sean’s arms; rigor mortis had started to set in.’”

“What do you like about it?” Professor Chesterfield asked.

“The semicolon.”

“It’s an excellent semicolon,” Professor Chesterfield agreed. “In fact, throughout the story Cara uses semicolons properly, and for that reason I’m going to give her an A in the class.”

“You are?” said Rufus.

“It’s been my experience,” Professor Chesterfield said, “that the average college student thinks of the semicolon as a very large comma. But Cara doesn’t, so I will give her an A. In fact, I will say this right now: whosoever uses semicolons correctly in this class will get an A for the year.”

“No matter how bad the writing is?” Rufus said.

Professor Chesterfield was so uninterested in grades that one time when a student came to complain about a C, he changed the grade to an A before the young man could even finish talking. “As for this particular story, it’s a dead character speaking in the last sentence, but it’s a dead character who knows her semicolons.”

Next came Simon Pelfrey’s story, which was called “Strumming in the Zone.” There was time travel in the story, and though the story didn’t say so explicitly, the characters, Julian surmised, were intended to be werewolves. At the very least, they were extremely hairy human beings. They spoke in what seemed like English, except that periodically the letter “z” would appear, orphan-like, in the middle of a sentence. It was as if Simon had committed the same typo over and over again.

“It was an experiment,” Simon explained when it was his turn to speak. “I’m writing experimental fiction.”

“God bless the American teenager,” Professor Chesterfield said, “and his experimental fiction.” The previous year, he told the class, one of his students, in her own idea of an experiment, had written a story about a husband and wife, only at the end of the story the reader learns that the wife isn’t a wife but a cat. “Fooled you,” the writer seemed to be saying. Professor Chesterfield tried to explain the difference between writing fiction and telling a riddle. On the blackboard he wrote, “THOU SHALT NOT CONFUSE A SHORT STORY WITH A RUBIK’S CUBE.”

“What was the experiment?” someone asked Simon.

“I was wondering that myself,” Professor Chesterfield said.

“The letter ‘z,’” Simon said, “is the last letter in the alphabet. I was trying to say something about endings.” He looked up at Professor Chesterfield. “The letter ‘z’ appeared in my story exactly a hundred times. I imagine that casts things in a different light.”

“What about your characters?” Julian said. “Are they supposed to be werewolves or people?”

“I left it open,” Simon said. “I didn’t want to bias the reader.”

“Well, thank you, Simon,” Professor Chesterfield said. “Thank you for sharing.” He gave the muzzle an affectionate squeeze.

He approached the blackboard.

THOU SHALT POPULATE YOUR STORIES WITH HOMO SAPIENS.

“And one more thing,” Professor Chesterfield said. “Would everyone please stop writing the same story?” According to Professor Chesterfield, the male students always wrote about fathers and sons going hunting together and the females always wrote about depressed young women who curl up into a ball.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Sue Persimmon, who seemed to take this personally.

Julian looked knowingly at Carter. Maybe that was what had happened in Professor Chesterfield’s office. Sue had curled up into a ball.

At the end of class, Professor Chesterfield asked Julian and Carter to stay behind again. “There’s a lot of bad writing here.”

“The worst,” said Julian.

“It’s easy to be a critic, isn’t it, Wainwright?” Professor Chesterfield got up from his desk and, without limping, walked across the classroom and out the door, leaving his cane and muzzle behind him.

That first semester Julian spent a lot of time watching. He watched his classmates as they walked to and from class, the sets of feet going up and down the steps of Thompson Hall, the air emerging from everyone’s lungs as the weather got colder. He watched the cigarette smoke, and the dust that flew up at the clapping of mittens, and he felt buoyed by it all.

In those fall months, he took to befriending the municipal workers in Northington, and soon he knew the names of the local policemen and firemen, of the meter maid, whom he greeted, “Good morning, Elaine,” saluting her as he passed. He would buy milk and orange juice and Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies from the local grocers in town, alternating among them, like a man spreading his largesse. But he went most often to Mr. Kang, the Korean grocer, who, when Julian came in, would tell Julian about his childhood in Korea; then Julian, holding a carton of milk in each hand, would tell Mr. Kang about his own childhood.