The Marriage Plot (12 page)

Mitchell was prepared, considering Madeleine’s other attributes, to overlook these details.

Sometimes when he stopped by, he found other guys already there. A sandy-haired prepster wearing wingtips without socks, or a large-nosed Milanese in tight pants. On these occasions Jennifer acted even less hospitable. As for Madeleine, she was either so used to male attention that she didn’t notice it anymore, or so guileless that she didn’t suspect why three guys might park themselves in her room like the suitors of Penelope. She didn’t appear to be sleeping with the other guys, as far as Mitchell could tell. This gave him hope.

Little by little, he went from sitting at Madeleine’s desk to sitting on the windowsill near her bed, to lying on the floor in front of her bed while she stretched out above him. Occasionally, the thought that he’d already seen her breast—that he knew exactly what her areola looked like—was enough to give him a hard-on, and he had to turn over on his stomach. Still, on the few times when Madeleine went on anything resembling a date with Mitchell—to a student theater production or poetry reading—there was a tightness around her eyes, as though she was registering the downside, socially and romantically, of being seen with him. She was new at college, too, and finding her way. It was possible she didn’t want to limit her options too soon.

A year went by like this. An entire blue-balled year. Mitchell stopped dropping by Madeleine’s room. Gradually, they drifted into different circles. He didn’t forget about her so much as decide that she was out of his league. Whenever he ran into her, she was so talkative and touched his arm so often that he began to get ideas again, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that anything came close to happening. In November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Mitchell mentioned that he was planning to stay on campus over break rather than fly back to Detroit, and Madeleine surprised him by inviting him to celebrate the holiday with her family in Prettybrook.

They arranged to meet at the Amtrak station, on Wednesday at noon. When Mitchell got there, lugging a prewar suitcase with some dead person’s fading gold initials on it, he found Madeleine waiting for him on the platform, wearing glasses. They were large tortoiseshell frames and, if it was possible, they made him like her even more. The lenses were badly scratched and the left temple was slightly bent. Otherwise, Madeleine was as well put together as always, or even more so, since she was on her way to see her parents.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Mitchell said.

“My contacts were hurting my eyes this morning.”

“I like them.”

“I only wear them sometimes. My eyes aren’t that bad.”

As he stood on the platform, Mitchell wondered if Madeleine’s wearing her glasses indicated that she felt comfortable around him, or if it meant that she didn’t care about looking her best for him. Once they were on the train, amid the crowd of holiday travelers, it was impossible to tell either way. After they found two seats together, Madeleine took her glasses off, holding them in her lap. As the train rolled out of Providence, she put them on again to watch the passing scenery, but quickly snatched them off, shoving them into her bag. (This was the reason her glasses were in the shape they were in; she’d lost the case long ago.)

The trip took five hours. Mitchell wouldn’t have minded if it had taken five days. It was thrilling to have Madeleine captive in the seat beside him. She’d brought volume one of Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
and, in what appeared to be a guilty traveling habit, a thick copy of
Vogue
. Mitchell stared out at the warehouses and body shops of Cranston before pulling out his
Finnegans Wake
.

“You’re not reading that,” Madeleine said.

“I am.”

“No way!”

“It’s about a river,” Mitchell said. “In Ireland.”

The train proceeded along the Rhode Island coast and into Connecticut. Sometimes the ocean appeared, or marshland, then just as suddenly they were passing along the ugly backside of a manufacturing town. In New Haven the train stopped to switch engines before proceeding to Grand Central. After taking the subway to Penn Station, Madeleine led Mitchell down to another set of tracks to catch the train for New Jersey. They arrived at Prettybrook just before eight at night.

The Hannas’ house was a hundred-year-old Tudor, fronted by London plane trees and dying hemlocks. Inside, everything was tasteful and half falling apart. The Oriental carpets had stains. The brick-red kitchen linoleum was thirty years old. When Mitchell used the powder room, he saw that the toilet paper dispenser had been repaired with Scotch tape. So had the peeling wallpaper in the hallway. Mitchell had encountered shabby gentility before, but here was Wasp thrift in its purest form. The plaster ceilings sagged alarmingly. Vestigial burglar alarms sprouted from the walls. The knob-and-tube wiring sent flames out of the lighting sockets when you unplugged anything.

Mitchell was good with parents. Parents were his specialty. Within an hour of arriving Wednesday night, he had established himself as a favorite. He knew the lyrics to the Cole Porter songs Alton played on the “hi-fi.” He allowed Alton to read excerpts from Kingsley Amis’s
On Drink
aloud, and seemed to find them just as hilarious as Alton did. At dinner, Mitchell talked about Sandra Day O’Connor with Phyllida and about Abscam with Alton. To top it off, Mitchell put in a dazzling performance later that night at Scrabble.

“I didn’t know
groszy
was a word,” Phyllida said, greatly impressed.

“It’s Polish currency. A hundred groszy are worth one zloty.”

“Are all your new friends at college this worldly, Maddy?” Alton said.

When Mitchell glanced at Madeleine, she was smiling at him. And that was when it had happened. Madeleine was wearing a bathrobe. She had her glasses on. She was looking both homey and sexy, completely out of his league and, at the same time, within reach, by virtue of how well he seemed to fit into her family already, and what a perfect son-in-law he would make. For all of these reasons Mitchell suddenly thought, “I’m going to marry this girl!” The knowledge went through him like electricity, a feeling of destiny.

“Foreign words are disallowed,” Madeleine said.

He spent Thanksgiving morning moving chairs for Phyllida, and drinking Bloody Marys and playing pool with Alton. The billiard table had braided leather pockets instead of a ball return. Lining up a shot, Alton said, “A few years ago, I noticed this table wasn’t level. The man the company sent out said it was warped, probably from one of the kids’ friends sitting on it. He wanted me to buy a whole new base. But I put a piece of wood under one leg. Problem solved.”

Soon company arrived. A mellow-voiced cousin named Doats, wearing tartan pants, his wife, Dinky, a frosted blonde with late–de Kooning teeth, and their young children and fat setter, Nap.

Madeleine got down on her knees to greet Nap, ruffling his fur and hugging him.

“Nap’s gotten so fat,” she said.

“You know what I think it is?” Doats said. “It’s because he’s fixed. Nap’s a eunuch. And eunuchs were always famously plump, weren’t they?”

Madeleine’s sister, Alwyn, and her husband, Blake Higgins, showed up around one. Alton fixed the cocktails while Mitchell made himself helpful by building a fire.

Thanksgiving dinner proceeded in a blur of wine refills and jesting toasts. After dinner, everyone repaired to the library, where Alton began serving port. The fire was dying, and Mitchell stepped outside to get more wood. By this time he was feeling no pain. He stared up at the starry night sky, through the branches of the white pines. He was in the middle of New Jersey but it might have been the Black Forest. Mitchell loved the house. He loved the whole big, genteel, boozy Hanna operation. Returning with firewood, he heard music playing. Madeleine was at the piano, while Alton sang along. The selection was something called “Til,” a family favorite. Alton’s voice was surprisingly good; he’d been in an a capella singing group at Yale. Madeleine was a little slow with the chord changes, plunking them out. Her glasses slid down her nose as she read the sheet music. She’d kicked off her shoes to press the pedals with bare feet.

Mitchell stayed through the weekend. On his last night in Prettybrook, as he was lying in his attic guest room, reading, he heard the hallway door open and feet begin climbing the stairs. Madeleine knocked softly on his door and came in.

She was dressed in a Lawrenceville T-shirt and nothing else. Her upper thighs, level with Mitchell’s head as she entered, were a little fuller than he’d expected.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

When she asked what he was reading, Mitchell had to look to remember the title. He was wonderfully and fearfully aware of his nakedness beneath the thin bedsheet. He felt that Madeleine was aware of this, too. He thought about kissing her. For a moment he thought that Madeleine might kiss him. And then, because Madeleine didn’t, because he was a house guest and her parents were sleeping downstairs, because, in that glorious moment, Mitchell felt that the tide had turned and he had all the time in the world to make his move, he did nothing. Finally, Madeleine got up, looking vaguely disappointed. She descended the stairs and switched off the light.

After she was gone, Mitchell replayed the scene in his mind, seeking a different outcome. Worried about soiling the bedding, he headed for the bathroom, bumping into an old box spring, which fell over with a clatter. When all was quiet again, he continued to the bathroom. In the tiny attic sink, he shot his load, turning on the tap to rinse away the least curd of evidence.

The next morning, they took the train back to Providence, walked together up College Hill, hugged, and parted. A few days later, Mitchell stopped by Madeleine’s room. She wasn’t there. On her message board was a note from someone named Billy: “Tarkovsky screening 7:30 Sayles. Be there or be
.” Mitchell left an unsigned quotation, a bit from the Gerty MacDowell section of
Ulysses
: “Then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads …”

A week went by and he didn’t hear from Madeleine. When he called he got no answer.

He went back to her dorm. Again she was out. On her message board someone had drawn an arrow pointing to his Joyce quotation along with the note “Who’s the perv?”

Mitchell erased this. He wrote, “Maddy, give me a call. Mitchell.” Then he erased this and wrote, “Permit a colloquy. M.”

Back in his own room, Mitchell examined himself in the mirror. He turned sideways, trying to see his profile. He pretended to be talking to someone at a party to see what he was really like.

After another week passed without his hearing from Madeleine, Mitchell stopped calling or dropping by her room. He became fierce about his studies, spending heroic amounts of time ornamenting his English papers, or translating Vergil’s extended metaphors about vineyards and women. When he finally did run into Madeleine again, she was just as friendly as always. For the rest of the year they continued to be close, going to poetry readings together and occasionally eating dinner in the Ratty, alone or with other people. When Madeleine’s parents visited in the spring, she invited Mitchell to have dinner with them at the Bluepoint Grill. But he never went back to the house in Prettybrook, never built a fire in their hearth, or drank a G & T on the deck overlooking the garden. Little by little, Mitchell managed to forge his own social life at school and, though they continued to be friends, Madeleine drifted off into hers. He never forgot his premonition, however. One night the following October, almost a year from the time he’d gone to Prettybrook, Mitchell saw Madeleine crossing campus in the purple twilight. She was with a curly-headed blond guy named Billy Bainbridge, whom Mitchell knew from his freshman hall. Billy took women’s studies courses and referred to himself as a feminist. Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine’s jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

•

In Plato’s
Phaedrus,
the speeches of Lysias the Sophist and of the early Socrates (before the latter makes his recantation) rest on this principle: that the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved.

In the weeks after breaking up with Leonard, Madeleine spent most of her time at the Narragansett, lying on her bed. She dragged herself to her final classes. She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance in the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread—the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue—before she’d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.