Matrimony Read Online Free

that supposed to mean?” said Sue Persimmon, who seemed to take this personally.
    Julian looked knowingly at Carter. Maybe that was what had happened in Professor Chesterfield’s office. Sue had curled up into a ball.
    At the end of class, Professor Chesterfield asked Julian and Carter to stay behind again. “There’s a lot of bad writing here.”
    “The worst,” said Julian.
    “It’s easy to be a critic, isn’t it, Wainwright?” Professor Chesterfield got up from his desk and, without limping, walked across the classroom and out the door, leaving his cane and muzzle behind him.
             
    That first semester Julian spent a lot of time watching. He watched his classmates as they walked to and from class, the sets of feet going up and down the steps of Thompson Hall, the air emerging from everyone’s lungs as the weather got colder. He watched the cigarette smoke, and the dust that flew up at the clapping of mittens, and he felt buoyed by it all.
    In those fall months, he took to befriending the municipal workers in Northington, and soon he knew the names of the local policemen and firemen, of the meter maid, whom he greeted, “Good morning, Elaine,” saluting her as he passed. He would buy milk and orange juice and Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies from the local grocers in town, alternating among them, like a man spreading his largesse. But he went most often to Mr. Kang, the Korean grocer, who, when Julian came in, would tell Julian about his childhood in Korea; then Julian, holding a carton of milk in each hand, would tell Mr. Kang about his own childhood.
    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