The Marriage Plot (16 page)

“I brought you an iced coffee.”

Richter stared across the desk at the offering, mildly surprised, but tolerant. “Thank you,” he said. He opened a manila folder and took out a sheaf of papers. Mitchell recognized it as his take-home exam. It appeared to have writing all over it, in an elegant hand.

“Have a seat,” Richter said.

Mitchell complied.

“I’ve taught at this college for twenty-two years,” Richter began. “In all of that time, only once have I received a paper that displays the depth of insight and philosophical acumen that yours does.” He paused. “The last student of whom I could say this is now the dean of Princeton Theological Seminary.”

Richter stopped, as though waiting for his words to sink in. They didn’t, particularly. Mitchell was pleased to have done well. He was used to doing well in school, but he still enjoyed it. Beyond that, his mind didn’t travel.

“You are a graduating senior this year, is that correct?”

“One week left, Professor.”

“Have you ever given serious thought to pursuing a career in scholarship?”

“Not serious thought, no.”

“What are you planning to do with your life?” Richter said.

Mitchell smiled. “Is my father hiding under your desk?” he said.

Richter’s brow furrowed. He was no longer smiling. He folded his hands, taking a new direction. “I sense from your exam that you are personally engaged with matters of religious belief. Am I right?”

“I guess you could say that,” Mitchell said.

“Your surname is Greek. Were you raised in the Orthodox tradition?”

“Baptized. That was about it.”

“And now?”

“Now?” Mitchell took a moment. He was accustomed to keeping quiet about his spiritual investigations. It felt odd to talk about them.

But Richter’s expression was nonjudgmental. He was bent forward in his chair, hands clasped on the desk. He was looking away, presenting only his ear. Under this encouragement, Mitchell opened up. He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he’d begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. “That was the beginning,” he said, “realizing how stupid I was.”

“Yes, yes.” Richter nodded quickly. The head-bowing suggested personal experience with thought-tormented states. Richter’s head remained low, listening. “I don’t know, one day I was just sitting there,” Mitchell went on, “and it hit me that almost every writer I was reading for my classes had believed in God. Milton, for starters. And George Herbert.” Did Professor Richter know George Herbert? Professor Richter did. “And Tolstoy. I realize Tolstoy got a little excessive, near the end. Rejecting
Anna Karenina
. But how many writers turn against their own genius? Maybe it was Tolstoy’s obsession with truth that made him so great in the first place. The fact that he was willing to give up his art was what made him a great artist.”

Again the sound of assent from the gray eminence above the desk blotter. The weather, the world outside, had ceased to exist for a moment. “So last summer I gave myself a reading list,” Mitchell said. “I read a lot of Thomas Merton. Merton got me into Saint John of the Cross and Saint John of the Cross got me into Meister Eckhart and
The Imitation of Christ.
Right now I’m reading
The Cloud of Unknowing.
”

Richter waited a moment before asking, “Your search has been purely intellectual?”

“Not only,” Mitchell said. He hesitated and then confessed, “I’ve also been going to church.”

“Which one?”

“You name it.” Mitchell smiled. “All kinds. But mostly Catholic.”

“I can understand the attraction of Catholicism,” Richter said. “But putting myself back in the time of Luther, and considering the excesses of the Church at the time, I think I would have sided with the schismatics.”

In Richter’s face Mitchell now saw the answer to the question he’d been asking all semester. He hesitated and asked, “So you believe in God, Professor Richter?”

In a firm tone, Richter specified, “I am a Christian religious believer.”

Mitchell didn’t know what that meant, exactly. But he understood why Richter was splitting hairs. The designation allowed him room for reservations and doubts, historical accommodations and dissent.

“I had no idea,” Mitchell said. “In class I couldn’t tell if you believed anything or not.”

“That’s the way the game is played.”

They sat there together, companionably sipping their iced coffees. And Richter made his offer.

“I want you to know that I think you have the potential to do significant work in contemporary Christian theological studies. If you would be at all inclined, I would see to it that you get a full scholarship to the Princeton Theological Seminary. Or to Harvard or Yale Divinity School, if you so prefer. I do not often exercise myself to this extent on behalf of students, but in this case I feel compelled to do so.”

Mitchell had never considered going to divinity school. But the idea of studying theology—of studying
anything
, as opposed to working nine-to-five—appealed to him. And so he’d told Richter that he would seriously think about it. He was taking a trip, a year off. He promised to write Richter when he got back and to tell him what he’d decided.

Given all the difficulties ganging up on Mitchell—the recession, his dubious degree, and, today, this morning’s fresh rebuff from Madeleine—the trip was the only thing he had to look forward to. Now, heading back to his apartment to dress for the commencement procession, Mitchell told himself that it didn’t matter what Madeleine thought of him. He would soon be gone.

His apartment, on Bowen Street, was only two blocks from Madeleine’s much nicer building. He and Larry occupied the second floor of an old clapboard tenement house. In five minutes he was climbing the front stairs.

Mitchell and Larry had decided to go to India one night after watching a Satyajit Ray film. They hadn’t been entirely serious at the time. From then on, however, whenever anybody asked what they were doing after graduation, Mitchell and Larry replied, “We’re going to India!” Reaction among their friends was universally positive. No one could come up with a reason why they shouldn’t go to India. Most people said that they wished they could come along. The result was that, without so much as buying plane tickets or a guidebook—without really knowing anything about India—Mitchell and Larry began to be seen as enviable, brave, free-thinking individuals. And so finally they decided that they had better go.

Little by little, the trip had come into focus. They added a European leg. In March, Larry, who was a theater major, had lined up the job as research assistants with Professor Hughes, which gave the trip a professional gloss and placated their parents. They’d bought a big yellow map of India and hung it on the kitchen wall.

The only thing that had nearly derailed their plans was the “party” they had thrown a few weeks ago, during Reading Period. It was Larry’s idea. What Mitchell hadn’t known, however, was that the party wasn’t a real party but Larry’s final project for the studio art course they were taking. Larry, it turned out, had “cast” certain guests as “actors,” giving them directions on how to behave at the party. Most of these directions involved insulting, coming on to, or freaking out the unsuspecting guests. For the first hour of the party, this resulted in everyone having a bad time. Friends came up to tell you that they’d always distrusted you, that you’d always had bad breath, et cetera. Around midnight, the downstairs neighbors, a married couple named Ted and Susan (who, Mitchell could see retrospectively, had been ridiculously costumed in terry-cloth bathrobes and fluffy slippers, Susan with curlers in her hair), burst angrily through the door, threatening to call the cops because of the loud music. Mitchell tried to calm them down. Dave Hayek, however, who was six-four, and in on the hoax, stomped across the kitchen and physically threatened the neighbors. In response, Ted pulled a (fake) gun from the pocket of his bathrobe, threatening to shoot Hayek, who cowered on the floor, pleading, while everyone else either froze in fear or rushed for the doors, spilling beer over everything. At that point, Larry had turned on all the lights, climbed onto a chair, and informed everyone, ha ha, that none of this was real. Ted and Susan took off their robes to reveal street clothes underneath. Ted showed everyone that the gun was a squirt gun. Mitchell couldn’t believe that Larry had failed to inform him, the party’s co-host, about the party’s secret agenda. He’d had no idea that Carlita Jones, a thirty-six-year-old graduate student, had been following the “script” when, earlier in the evening, she had locked Mitchell and herself in a bedroom, saying, “Come on, Mitchell. Let’s do the nasty. Right here on the floor.” He was greatly surprised that sex offered openly in this way (as it often was in his fantasies) proved in reality to be not only unwelcome but frightening. Yet despite all this and how enraged he was at Larry for using the party to fulfill his course requirements (though Mitchell should have been suspicious when the art professor herself had shown up), Mitchell knew even later that night, after everyone had left—even while he screamed at Larry, who was getting sick over the balcony, “Go on! Puke your guts out! You deserve it!”—that he would forgive Larry for turning their house and party into bad performance art. Larry was his best friend, they were going to India together, and Mitchell had no choice.

Now he let himself into his apartment and went straight to Larry’s door, flinging it open.

On a futon mattress, his face half-hidden in a bush of Garfunkel hair, Larry lay on his side, his thin frame forming a Z. He looked like a figure at Pompeii, someone who’d curled up in a corner as the lava and ash came through the window. Thumbtacked to the wall above his head were two photographs of Antonin Artaud. In the photo on the left, Artaud was young and unbelievably handsome. In the other, taken a brief decade later, the playwright looked like a withered maniac. It was the speed and totality of Artaud’s physical and mental disintegration that appealed to Larry.

“Get up,” Mitchell said to him.

When Larry didn’t respond, Mitchell picked up a Samuel French script from the floor and tossed it at his head.

Larry groaned and rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open, but he seemed in no rush to regain consciousness. “What time is it?”

“It’s late. We’ve got to get going.”

After a long moment, Larry sat up. He was on the small side, with a puckish or faun-like quality to his face, which, depending on the light or how much he’d been partying, could look either as high-cheekboned as Rudolf Nureyev or as hollow-cheeked as the figure in Munch’s
The Scream.
Right now, it was somewhere in between.

“You missed a good party last night,” he said.

Mitchell was stone-faced. “I’m over parties.”

“Now, now, Mitchell, don’t be extreme. Is this how you’re going to be on our trip? A drag?”

“I just saw Madeleine,” Mitchell said with urgency. “She decided to start talking to me again. But then I said something she didn’t like, and now she isn’t.”

“Nice job.”

“She broke up with Bankhead, though.”

“I know she did,” Larry said.

An alarm went off in Mitchell’s head. “How do you know?” he asked.

“Because she left the party last night with Thurston Meems. She was on the
prowl
, Mitchell. I told you to come. Too bad you’re over parties.”

Mitchell stood up straighter to blunt the force of this revelation. Larry knew, of course, of Mitchell’s obsession with Madeleine. Larry had heard Mitchell extol her virtues and defend or contextualize her more questionable attributes. Mitchell had revealed to Larry, as you did only to a real friend, the extent of his crazy thinking when it came to Madeleine. Still, Mitchell had his pride, and showed no reaction. “Get your ass up,” he said, withdrawing into the hall. “I don’t want to be late.”

Back in his room, Mitchell closed the door and went to sit in his desk chair, hanging his head. Certain details of the morning, previously illegible, were slowly revealing significance, like skywriting. Madeleine’s disheveled hair. Her hangover.

Suddenly, with savage decisiveness, he spun around and ripped off the lid of the cardboard box that was lying on his desk. Inside was his graduation robe. Taking it out, he stood up and pulled the shiny acrylic fabric over his head and shoulders. The tassel, class pin, and mortarboard were shrink-wrapped in separate sheets of plastic. After ripping these off, and screwing the tassel into the mortarboard so thoroughly it made a dent, Mitchell unfolded the cap’s bat wings and set it on his head.

He heard Larry pad into the kitchen. “Mitchell,” Larry called, “should I bring a joint?”

Without answering, Mitchell went to stand before the mirror on the back of his bedroom door. Mortarboards were medieval in origin. They were as old as “The Cloud of Unknowing.” That was why they looked so ridiculous. That was why he looked so ridiculous wearing one.

He remembered a line from Meister Eckhart: “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

Mitchell wondered if he was supposed to erase himself, or his past, or other people, or what. He was ready to begin erasing immediately, as soon as he knew what to rub out.

When he came out into the kitchen, Larry was making coffee, wearing his cap and gown, too. They looked at each other with mild amusement.

“Definitely bring a joint,” Mitchell said.

•

Madeleine took the long way back to her building.

She was furious at everyone and everything, at her mother for making her invite Mitchell over in the first place, at Leonard for not calling, at the weather for being cold, and at college for ending.

It was impossible to be friends with guys. Every guy she’d ever been friends with had ended up wanting something else, or had wanted something else from the beginning, and had been friends only under false pretenses.

Mitchell wanted revenge. That was all this was. He wanted to hurt her and he knew her weak spots. It was absurd of him to say that he wasn’t mentally attracted to her. Hadn’t he been after her all these years? Hadn’t he told her that he “loved her mind”? Madeleine knew she wasn’t as smart as Mitchell. But was Mitchell as smart as Leonard? What about that? That was what she should have told Mitchell. Instead of crying and running away, she should have pointed out that Leonard was perfectly happy with her level of intelligence.