Matrimony (22 page)

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 figured 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?”

“New York,” Julian said. “Though the last place I lived was Ann Arbor.” He looked up at Henry. “How about you?”

“I grew up in Hanover,” Henry said. “And then I went to Dartmouth. You’d think I’d have had more imagination.”

“I’ve never been to Hanover,” Julian said, “but I suspect it might be my next stop. I’ve been making a tour of college towns.”

“How long did you live in Ann Arbor?”

“Nine years.”

“Can you imagine living here for nine years?”

“Right now, I can’t imagine living here for nine weeks.”

“I hear Ann Arbor’s a nice place,” Henry said.

“It’s all right. The problem is, everyone’s either twenty or fifty. You hit your thirties and you’re not sure what to do. You end up sleeping with your students.”

“Is that what you did?”

“In one case. Though she wasn’t my student any longer. I was on the rebound. My wife and I had just split up.” He’d been hopeful about Trilby, and he could tell that she’d been hopeful, too, but in the end they’d been disappointed. Another time, another place, other circumstances: he really had liked her. It had been five years since she’d been his student, but they’d never been able to get past that; what had started as one thing hadn’t managed to become something else. Or maybe it had simply been too soon. He had slept with a couple of other people, kindhearted, attractive women who took a sincere interest in him and he’d thought he’d be able to do the same for them. He’d managed to get himself into bed with them, but that, he learned, was the easy part; it was everything else he failed at. That was another reason he had come to Iowa City. To try again with someone else, knowing he wouldn’t run into Mia.

He was in Henry’s study now, where in the middle of the desk sat an old typewriter. “Do you actually write on that?”

“Sometimes,” Henry said. “Word processors have their uses, but I’m suspicious of them. The screen makes things look neat before they actually are.”

Julian pointed to a box. “Is your novel in there?”

Henry nodded.

“Will you bring it in to workshop?”

“It’s done,” Henry said. “My agent will sell it or she won’t. It’s time to move on to other things.”

“I was working on a novel myself,” Julian said. “That’s why I came to Iowa. To try to get back to it.”

“Will you be showing it to class?”

“First I have to finish it. And after yesterday, why show anything to those jerks?”

“They’re just jealous,” Henry said. “They’re not the ones who were published in
Harper’s.
”

“It’s just one story.”

“What about that spread in
The Village Voice
?”

Julian shrugged. “The world is full of prognosticators.” The feature in the
Voice
had called him promising. It was how Professor Chesterfield had described him, what countless others had said about him over the years, and every time he heard the word he thought of what Cyril Connolly had said: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” He was thirty-two now. When was he going to fulfill his promise?

Henry said, “It’s never a bad sign when people hate your work. It shows you inspired passion.”

“Is that what you told yourself after you were up? That you must be on to something if they were so vicious to you?”

“I tried to,” Henry said. “But sure, it hurts.” He picked up the box that held his novel. It looked as if he were going to open it, but he just hefted it to his chest and returned it to the floor. “If it counts for anything, I really liked your story.”