Matrimony (3 page)

On one of his morning walks Julian found a stray Beagle who took a liking to him and followed him on the footpath back to campus, staying outside his dorm and bleating until Julian didn’t have the heart to leave him outside. There was a tag with the owner’s name around the dog’s collar, and when Julian called Mr. Quincy to pick the dog up, Mr. Quincy was so grateful he thrust a fifty-dollar bill into Julian’s hand and refused to take it back.

A few mornings a week Julian began to walk Mr. Quincy’s Beagle, and then other dogs, too, and soon he could be seen walking along the streets of Northington with eight or nine dogs at his side, Retrievers, Collies, Shepherds, a St. Bernard, and Mary, his favorite, an aging Newfoundland who trailed the rest of the pack like a den mother and who, like Julian, seemed filled with the spirit of discovery, turning her head from side to side like someone perched on a parade float. Mary was so big a few of the Northington children thought she was a bear until Julian assured them she was a dog, and he allowed them to feed Mary scraps of meat, which he carried in a cellophane baggie inside his knapsack.

Sometimes, late at night, on the way back from a movie or simply alone walking through town, taken with the sense that his life was romantic, that the life of a young man at college was the only life to live, yet filled at the same time with a melancholy whose roots he couldn’t unearth, feeling unappreciated, turned down by some girl, Julian would stop at Mr. Kang’s grocery where he would find Mr. Kang tending to the fruits and vegetables. Mr. Kang used a hose that sprayed a mist so fine Julian could practically see the individual particles of water. Inside, Mrs. Kang was at the cash register examining a bulb of fennel. Julian thought he would like nothing better than to own a grocery, he and some future Mrs. Wainwright, the two of them tending the fruits and vegetables, late nights in the storeroom in back, punching the keys on their matching calculators. Other times, however, there was nothing he would have liked less than to be hovering over the produce in the growing cold, and he would comfort Mr. Kang with the fact that he’d be closing at midnight whereas the Korean grocers in New York City were open twenty-four hours a day.

“New York’s the city that never sleeps,” Julian said. He started to sing—“New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town”—and as he did, he thought about the Korean grocers in New York City, the one in his parents’ neighborhood next to the pizza place on Second Avenue, how everyone ended up in their own niche, the Korean grocers and the Israeli taxi drivers and the old mustachioed Italian men selling cherry and rainbow ices in Central Park, as if the whole thing had been ordained by some invisible force. He thought about the Irish girl who served him vanilla milk shakes at the diner at three in the morning, the construction men perched high above midtown, and George, the elevator man in his parents’ building, who, when he got off at midnight, took the subway back to Queens. Walking along the streets of New York, Julian liked to stare into the windows of people’s apartments and contemplate the lives that went on inside, the way he liked to contemplate Mr. Kang’s life, his life outside the produce store, his life with Mrs. Kang. “I have to go home and study,” he said.

“It’s too late to study,” said Mr. Kang.

“That’s the problem. I’ve only just started.” Julian shook Mr. Kang’s hand and waved at Mrs. Kang inside the store. Then he wended his way back to campus, holding a bag of Golden Delicious apples Mr. Kang had given him for free, and as he walked toward the college gates he ate an apple down to the core and then he ate another one.

So Julian and Carter were becoming friends. But Julian couldn’t tell whether Carter liked him. It came down to this: Julian was a rich kid from New York City and Carter wasn’t. According to Carter, Graymont was filled with rich kids from New York City, and Carter was from California, just outside San Francisco, and he had no interest in New York City. He equated Graymont with New England and New England with wealth and wealth with New York City and New York City with bullshit, and Carter hated bullshit, he’d grown up in a place utterly devoid of bullshit, in a completely bullshit-less town.

No bullshit in San Francisco? Julian had been to San Francisco, and there was plenty of bullshit there, even if it was different from the bullshit in New York. Carter was from the suburbs, besides. The suburbs were
all
bullshit.

In Carter’s opinion, everything was more impressive on the West Coast. There was a great cultural divide that flowed with the waters of the Mississippi and cast its shadow across the Rocky Mountains and the Mojave Desert and accounted for the fact that in creative writing class Carter was the only one who didn’t take notes and, in general, all the other students cared and he didn’t. His first day at Graymont, Carter showed up in torn blue jeans and scuffed boots made of alligator leather and with several days’ growth of beard on his face. That first semester, he would walk across campus with his sneakers untied, his blue jeans frayed, his shirt not fully buttoned, running his hand through his hair as if he were in a permanent state of having just woken up.

But if Carter didn’t care, why, right now, was he asking Julian to read his short stories, and why was he standing in Julian’s room watching him like a voyeur? Carter’s stories were good—they were
really
good, Julian thought—but when Julian told Carter this, Carter just shrugged.

According to Carter, there was a sexual abandon where he had grown up that helped account for the fact that he’d lost his virginity at thirteen whereas Julian hadn’t lost his until much later. “And thirteen was late,” Carter said.

Often, Julian felt Carter didn’t have time for him, but then Carter would show up at his dorm and they’d go play pickup basketball, and late at night they’d walk to the Store 24 or stop for cheeseburgers and onion rings at the Bison Bar and Grill and then go play poker with the guys down the hall. After Professor Chesterfield’s class they would return to the dorms and Carter would ask to see Julian’s stories. Carter liked Julian’s stories and he liked Julian himself, and one night, drunk on beers and having smoked some pot, Carter admitted that the reason he talked so much about the West Coast was that he missed home, he missed his mother and father, and he found the East Coast daunting, the history of it, the wealth, New England especially, where he’d gone to prep school on scholarship for a couple of years before returning home and graduating from his local public school. That was why he had come to Graymont, to show himself he wasn’t intimidated by New England and by people like Julian who came from New York City and had lots of money and had been to places he’d never been to, such as Europe. And although it was true he’d lost his virginity, it hadn’t been at thirteen, and when Carter told Julian this he looked as if he were going to cry.

Now the empty beer cans were collecting on the floor and Carter was saying, “I love you, Wainwright, I love you, man,” and he hugged Julian so hard he almost knocked the wind out of him. Really, Carter said, they were going to be writers someday. “You’re a fucking sophomoric, pusillanimous writer, both of us are, the only two talents in the class.” Carter was laughing, and then it seemed he was going to cry, and now, embarrassed, he said, “Hey, you
dork
!” and he kneed Julian hard in the leg.

Then they went camping together. They were in the car, and Carter was talking about virginity again. According to him, a girl could get her virginity back.

“Retrieve it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How?”

“Surgery,” Carter said. “It’s for born-agains, mostly. Doctors are reinserting the girl’s hymen. You know how on a movie set a guy gets shot and there’s blood all over the place but he’s really just bleeding ketchup? Well, it’s the same idea. A girl gets a new hymen but it’s not really a new hymen. It’s a fake new hymen.”

“Made of ketchup?”

“Made of who knows what. It’s mostly for born-agains, like I said. Some kind of Pentecostal medical ritual. Not that you’d have to be a born-again. But why else would you do it?”

“Why would anyone do it?”

“I have no idea.”

At the campground where they pitched tent, Julian was learning new things about Carter, such as the fact that Carter could imitate a loon. Carter was so eerily adept at imitating a loon that when Julian closed his eyes he thought Carter was a loon. So did the loons themselves. Carter was leading them in a chorus of calling.

“That’s fucking fantastic,” Julian said.

Carter shrugged. “I’ve got perfect pitch. I was born with it, I guess.”

“I can do this with my tongue,” Julian said. He curled up his tongue into three segments so it resembled a cauliflower.

“That’s excellent,” Carter said.

“It’s retarded,” said Julian.

“Sure it’s retarded. But it’s also excellent.”

For dinner, Julian and Carter grilled hot dogs, and they wrapped corn and potatoes in tin foil and tossed them into the fire and ate those, too. By the time he was done eating, Julian felt so full he could barely move and he beached himself on the hood of the car. He lay on his back, his arms spread to the sides, looking at the sky through a knot of branches. “The thing about hot dogs is, once they’re inside you the pieces come back together again. It’s like they’re guided by some magnetic force.”

“Hot dogs,” Carter said, “are made entirely of cow testicles. Except for the parts made of pig testicles.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Julian said.

Carter handed him a stick with five roasted marshmallows on it. “You know what marshmallows are made of?”

“Some other kind of testicles?”

“I suspect so,” Carter said.

In the tent that night they talked about the fact that they were two guys who weren’t half bad-looking, so why were they camping alone?

In Carter’s opinion, it all came down to evolutionary biology. How else could you explain Henry Kissinger who, if the rumors were to be believed, was a lothario. Anyone who had seen Henry Kissinger recognized in him a familiar figure from their past, the kid from their high school class who was smarter than everyone else but who didn’t have any friends. Henry Kissinger had orchestrated the Vietnam War. He’d bombed the Indochinese and lived to tell about it to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars a speech. Never mind the starving children in Ethiopia and Cambodia. If any evidence was needed that the world was an unjust place, all one had to do was consider Henry Kissinger’s sex life. Henry Kissinger was ugly and corrupt; he was a war criminal. But he was a war criminal with sex appeal.

Julian said, “Maybe girls like it when you bomb people. You know, maybe they find it erotic.”

“That’s part of it,” Carter said. “Henry Kissinger’s older than we are, right?”

Julian nodded.

“He’s older than we are, he’s wealthier than we are, and he’s more powerful than we are, so girls like that. They’re looking for someone to protect their offspring. They think they’re looking for something else, but they don’t have a clue. It’s the same with us. We like girls who are hot.”

“Certainly.”

“Well, we
think
we like girls who are hot, but subconsciously,
evolutionarily,
we like girls who are fertile.”

“A hot girl is a fertile girl,” Julian said.

“The problem is, the fertile girls don’t like us back. Evolution’s got us by the balls.” Carter looked up at the inside of the tent, as if hoping it would provide an answer to their predicament. “The one consolation is Henry Kissinger is having empty sex.”

“You think?”

“Definitely. Guys like Henry Kissinger who were what they were in high school spend the rest of their lives compensating. Nothing makes Henry Kissinger satisfied.”

“Not even the sex?”

“I’m telling you,” Carter said, “the man’s unhappy. He’s very depressed.”

But Carter himself was depressed. At least that was what Julian thought as Carter’s story “Boat People” was discussed in class. Because Professor Chesterfield, instead of doing what he usually did, which was allow the class to attack the story before following with a more sustained attack of his own, forbade all discussion of Carter’s story and read it aloud from start to finish, after which he said, “This story is brilliant, it’s publishable.”

But later, in the dorms, Carter seemed so glum it was as if he hadn’t heard the praise.

“The world’s greatest curmudgeon called you brilliant, Heinz, and all you can do is sulk? Do you know what I’d give to have Chesterfield say my story is publishable?”

“Then I wish it had been you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Who cares how well I write? I’ll still be mopping people’s floors.” As part of his work-study package, Carter was required to clean the dormitory bathrooms of the very students he went to class with. It didn’t help—it made matters worse, in fact—that Julian refused to let Carter clean his bathroom, that he even volunteered to join Carter on his work-study days and, bucket in tow, help him mop the floors and brush the toilet bowls of the students down the hall. “What’s with the noblesse oblige?” Carter said. “Who do you think you are? The welfare state?”

Then winter break came, and when Carter said he wasn’t returning to California—he couldn’t afford the ticket, he admitted—Julian insisted he come home with him. “At least come for Christmas dinner,” Julian said. “My mother’s an amazing cook.”

On the drive to the city, Carter was silent, pretending to sleep, and no matter how hard Julian tried, he couldn’t get Carter to talk to him.

When they arrived in New York, Julian, hoping to impress Carter, took him to the Empire State Building, where they rode the elevator to the observation deck and dropped quarters into the telescopes. “Oh, man, I can see Europe,” Julian said, and Carter said, “You’re facing the wrong direction.” Julian fed more quarters into the telescope, and now, pointing the telescope at the building across from them, he said, “Oh, man, that girl’s naked,” and for an instant he had Carter fooled and Carter stepped forward to look through the telescope.