Free Matrimony by Joshua Henkin Page B

they all knew he wasn’t keeping track.
    Soon the check came, and Carter signed the credit card slip “C. Myers Briggs.”
    Now, back at the co-op, Julian exclaimed, “God bless Carl Jung!” and they all deposited themselves into the hot tub, the four of them naked except for their wigs.
    “May we never graduate!” Pilar said and, one by one, Carter released the remaining pages of the test. The group of them watched the paper float away, the ink melting in the bubbles and the heat, and they closed their eyes and passed around a beer and declared their intentions not to think about the future.
    But later that night, Julian saw Carter sitting alone in the garden.
    “Want to take a ride?” Carter said, offering Julian a seat in his own car.
    They drove through town and out of Northington, the car gliding over the road. “Are you kidnapping me?”
    “We keep going straight,” Carter said, “and we hit California.” Rain had begun to fall, and Carter turned on the windshield wipers. There was a series of red lights, and then the traffic cleared and what was left before them was farmland, cows and horses dappled in the moonlight.
    “What’s going to happen when we graduate?” Carter said. “I can’t believe you don’t take this seriously.”
    “Heinz, you’re not going to turn into a pumpkin.”
    To the sides of the road stood bushes and a few evergreens; most of the trees had divested themselves of leaves, and the bare branches rose and fell in the wind, like arms being raised above someone’s head.
    “So you want to write fiction,” Carter said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
    “You know I do.”
    “That’s not really an option for me.”
    “Of course it is.”
    Carter looked over at him. “So you go sit in a café in Paris? Or Kyoto, or Prague, or wherever they’re doing it now?”
    “That’s not what I had in mind.”
    “Writing is for rich people.”
    “Investment banking is for rich people. Writing is something else.”
    “You’re a trust fund kid,” Carter said.
    “Maybe so,” said Julian. But if Carter believed that was who he was at heart, he didn’t know anything about him.
    Ahead of them, a raccoon stepped onto the road, and Carter swerved around it. He cracked open the window and a breeze came in; there was the scent of sea and lilac. “Do you really think we’ll be friends in ten years?”
    “I hope so,” Julian said.
    “My father’s always saying that college is the great equalizer. Here, we’re all taking the same courses and eating the same meals. But then we graduate and gravitate toward our own kind.”
    “In that case,” Julian said, trying to lighten things, “you better make a lot of money.”
    “I’m thinking of doing that,” Carter said.
    “You’d be good at it, I suspect. The fact is, I haven’t seen anything you’re not good at.”
    Carter tapped his hand against the dashboard, nodding purposefully to the beat.
    “If you want to resent someone,” Julian said, “you should resent Pilar.” Pilar’s father, Theodore Brodhead, had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He’d been in attendance at President Johnson’s fifty-seventh birthday party when the White House chef made a cake decorated with the symbols of the Great Society. Pilar’s father had eaten Medicaid.
    “Maybe I do resent her,” Carter said.
    They were quiet now, and as the fog settled onto the road it was as if they were driving through bags of fleece. The gas needle had dropped and there were no signs anywhere and Julian was afraid they might run out of fuel. “We should probably head back. The girls will be waiting up for us.”
    Carter spun the car around, and Julian thought of him and Pilar on his scooter, Carter spending the risk he’d been allotted.
    “Did you ever think you’d still be with Mia? Three years after you started to go out?”
    Julian shook his head. “What about you and Pilar?”
    “Not a chance. Before Pilar, I hadn’t been with