Matrimony Read Free Page A

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