The Marriage Plot (11 page)

Leonard was kissing her. When she could bear no more, Madeleine grabbed him savagely by his ears. She pulled Leonard’s head away and held it still to show him the evidence of how she felt (she was crying now). In a hoarse voice edged with something else, a sense of peril, Madeleine said, “I love you.”

Leonard stared back at her. His eyebrows twitched. Suddenly, he rolled sideways off the mattress. He stood up and walked, naked, across the room. Crouching, he reached into her bag and pulled out
A Lover’s Discourse
, from the pocket where she always kept it. He flipped the pages until he found the one he wanted. Then he returned to the bed and handed the book to her.

I Love You
je-t’aime /
I-love-you

As she read these words, Madeleine was flooded with happiness. She glanced up at Leonard, smiling. With his finger he motioned for her to keep going.
The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry
. Suddenly Madeleine’s happiness diminished, usurped by the feeling of peril. She wished she weren’t naked. She narrowed her shoulders and covered herself with the bedsheet as she obediently read on.

Once the first avowal has been made, “I love you” has no meaning whatever …

Leonard, squatting, had a smirk on his face.

It was then that Madeleine threw the book at his head.

•

Beyond the bay window of Carr House, the graduation traffic was now steady. Roomy parental vehicles (Cadillacs and S-Class Mercedeses, along with the occasional Chrysler New Yorker or Pontiac Bonneville) were making their way from the downtown hotels up College Hill for the ceremony. At the wheel of each car was a father, solid-looking and determined but driving a bit tentatively owing to Providence’s many one-way streets. In the passenger seats sat mothers, released from domestic duties nowhere else but here, in the husband-chauffered family car, and therefore free to stare out at the pretty college-town scenery. The cars carried entire families, siblings mostly, but here and there a grandparent picked up in Old Saybrook or Hartford and brought along to see Tim or Alice or Prakrti or Heejin collect a hard-won sheepskin. There were city taxis, too, and livery cabs spewing blue exhaust, and little scarab-like rental cars scurrying between lanes as though to avoid being squashed. As the traffic crossed the Providence River and began to climb Waterman Street, some drivers tooted their horns upon seeing the huge Brown banner above the entrance of First Baptist Church. Everyone had been hoping for beautiful weather for graduation. But, as far as Mitchell was concerned, the gray skies and unseasonably cool temperatures were fine with him. He was glad Campus Dance had gotten rained out. He was glad the sun wasn’t shining. The sense of bad luck that hung over everything accorded perfectly with his mood.

It was never much fun to be called a jerk. It was worse to be called a jerk by a girl you particularly liked, and it was especially painful when the girl happened to be the person you secretly wanted to marry.

After Madeleine had stormed out of the café, Mitchell had remained at the table, paralyzed with regret. They’d made up for all of twenty minutes. He was leaving Providence that night and, in a few months, the country. There was no telling when or if he would ever see her again.

Across the street, the bells began to chime nine o’clock. Mitchell had to get going. The commencement march started in forty-five minutes. His cap and gown were back at his apartment, where Larry was waiting for him. Instead of getting up, however, Mitchell moved his chair closer to the window. He pressed his nose nearly to the glass, taking his last look at College Hill, while silently repeating the following words:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Mitchell had been reciting the Jesus Prayer for the past two weeks. He did this not only because it was the prayer Franny Glass repeated to herself in
Franny and Zooey
(though this was certainly a recommendation). Mitchell approved of Franny’s religious desperation, her withdrawal from life, and her disdain for “section men.” He found her book-length nervous breakdown, during which she never once moved from the couch, not only thrillingly dramatic but cathartic in a way Dostoyevsky was
supposed
to be but wasn’t, for him. (Tolstoy was a different matter.) Still, even though Mitchell was undergoing a similar crisis of meaning, it hadn’t been until he’d come across the Jesus Prayer in a book called
The Orthodox Church
that he’d decided to give it a try. The Jesus Prayer, it turned out, belonged to the religious tradition into which Mitchell had been obscurely baptized twenty-two years earlier. For this reason he felt entitled to say it. And so he’d been doing just that, while walking around campus, or during Quaker Meeting at the Meeting House near Moses Brown, or at moments like this when the inner tranquillity he’d been struggling to attain began to fray, to falter.

Mitchell liked the chant-like quality of the prayer. Franny said you didn’t even have to think about what you were saying; you just kept repeating the prayer until your heart took over and started repeating it for you. This was important because, whenever Mitchell stopped to think about the words of the Jesus Prayer, he didn’t much like them. “Lord Jesus” was a difficult opener. It had a Bible Belt ring. Likewise, asking for “mercy” felt lowly and serf-like. Having made it through “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” however, Mitchell was confronted with the final stumbling block of “a sinner.” And this was hard indeed. The gospels, which Mitchell didn’t take literally, said you had to die to be born again. The mystics, whom he took as literally as their metaphorical language allowed, said the self had to be subsumed in the Godhead. Mitchell liked the idea of being subsumed in the Godhead. But it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it.

He recited the prayer for another minute, until he felt calmer. Then he got up and went out of the café. Across the street, the side doors of the church were open now. The organist was warming up, the music drifting out over the grass. Mitchell looked down the hill in the direction that Madeleine had disappeared. Seeing no sign of her, he started down Benefit on the way back to his apartment.

Mitchell’s relationship with Madeleine Hanna—his long, aspirational, sporadically promising yet frustrating relationship—had begun at a toga party during freshman orientation. It was the kind of thing he instinctively hated: a keg party based on a Hollywood movie, a capitulation to the mainstream. Mitchell hadn’t come to college to act like John Belushi. He hadn’t even seen
Animal House
. (He was an Altman fan.) The alternative, however, would have been to sit in his room alone, and so finally, in a spirit of refusal that didn’t include boycotting the party outright, he’d attended in his regular clothes. As soon as he arrived in the basement recreation room, he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d thought that not wearing a toga would make him seem too cool for such jejune festivities, but as he stood in the corner, drinking a plastic cup of foamy beer, Mitchell felt just as much like a misfit as he always did at parties full of popular people.

It was at this point that he noticed Madeleine. She was in the middle of the floor, dancing with a guy whom Mitchell recognized as an RA. Unlike most girls at the party, who looked dumpy in their togas, Madeleine had tied a cord around her waist, fitting her sheet to her body. Her hair was piled on top of her head, Roman-style, and her back was alluringly bare. Other than her exceptional looks, Mitchell noticed that she was an uninspired dancer—she held a beer and talked to the RA, barely paying attention to the beat—and that she kept leaving the party to go down the hall. The third time she was going out, Mitchell, emboldened by alcohol, went up to her and blurted out, “Where do you keep going?”

Madeleine wasn’t startled. She was probably used to strange guys trying to talk to her. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll think I’m weird.”

“No, I won’t,” Mitchell said.

“This is my dorm. I figured since everyone was going to the party, the washers would be free. So I decided to do my laundry at the same time.”

Mitchell took a sip of foam without taking his eyes off her. “Do you need help?”

“No,” Madeleine said, “I can handle it.” As if she thought this sounded mean, she added, “You can come watch, if you want. Laundry’s pretty exciting.”

She started down the cinder-block hallway and he followed at her side.

“Why aren’t you wearing a toga?” she asked him.

“Because it’s dumb!” Mitchell said, nearly shouting. “It’s so stupid!”

This wasn’t the best move, but Madeleine didn’t appear to take it personally. “I just came because I was bored,” she said. “If this wasn’t my dorm, I probably would have bagged.”

In the laundry room, Madeleine began pulling her damp underthings out of a coin-operated washer. For Mitchell, this was titillating enough. But in the next second, something unforgettable occurred. As Madeleine reached into the washer, the knot at her shoulder loosened and the bedsheet fell away.

It was amazing how an image like that—of nothing, really, just a few inches of epidermis—could persist in the mind with undiminished clarity. The moment had lasted no more than three seconds. Mitchell hadn’t been entirely sober at the time. And yet now, almost four years later, he could return to the moment at will (and it was surprising how often he wanted to do this), summoning all of its sensory details, the rumbling of the dryers, the pounding music next door, the linty smell of the dank basement laundry room. He remembered exactly where he’d been standing and how Madeleine had stooped forward, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as the sheet slipped and, for a few exhilarating moments, her pale, quiet, Episcopalian breast exposed itself to his sight.

She quickly covered herself, glancing up and smiling, possibly with embarrassment.

Later on, after their relationship became the intimate, unsatisfying thing it became, Madeleine always disputed Mitchell’s memory of that night. She insisted that she hadn’t worn a toga to the party and that even if she had—and she wasn’t saying that she had—it had never slipped off. Neither on that night, nor on any of the thousand nights since, had he ever seen her naked breast.

Mitchell replied that he’d seen it that once and was very sorry it hadn’t happened again.

In the weeks following the toga party, Mitchell began appearing at Madeleine’s dorm unannounced. After his afternoon Latin class, he walked through the cool leaf-smelling air to Wayland Quad and, his head still throbbing with Vergil’s dactylic hexameter, climbed the stairs to her third-floor room. Standing in Madeleine’s doorway or, on luckier days, sitting at her desk, Mitchell did his best to be amusing. Madeleine’s roommate, Jennifer, always gave him a look indicating that she knew exactly why he was there. Fortunately, she and Madeleine didn’t seem to get along, and Jenny often left them alone. Madeleine always seemed happy he’d dropped by. She immediately started telling him about whatever she was reading, while he nodded, as though he could possibly pay attention to her thoughts on Ezra Pound or Ford Madox Ford while standing close enough to smell her shampooed hair. Sometimes Madeleine made him tea. Instead of going for an herbal infusion from Celestial Seasonings, with a quotation from Lao Tzu on the package, Madeleine was a Fortnum & Mason’s drinker, her favorite blend Earl Grey. She didn’t just dump a bag in a cup, either, but brewed loose leaves, using a strainer and a tea cozy. Jennifer had a poster of Vail over her bed, a skier waist-deep in powder. Madeleine’s side of the room was more sophisticated. She’d hung up a set of framed Man Ray photographs. Her bedspread and cashmere sham were the same serious shade of charcoal gray as her V-neck sweaters. On top of her dresser lay exciting womanly objects: a monogrammed silver lipstick, a Filofax containing maps of the New York Subway and the London Underground. But there were also semiembarrassing items: a photograph of her family wearing color-coordinated clothing; a Lilly Pulitzer bathrobe; and a decrepit stuffed bunny named Foo Foo.