Matrimony Read Free Page B

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