The Marriage Plot (21 page)

Moira never paid her parking tickets, just stashed them in the glove box. When Harvey found out, he shouted at the dinner table, “That’s fiscal irresponsibility!” The Pleshettes attended family therapy sessions, all six of them going weekly to a shrink in Manhattan to hash out their conflicts. Like Mitchell’s father, Harvey had served in World War II. He dressed in khaki suits and bow ties, smoked Dominican cigars, and was in every way a member of that superconfident, supermature generation that went to war. And yet once a week Harvey lay on a mat, on the floor of a shrink’s office, and listened without complaint as his children hurled abuse at him. The floor mat subverted hierarchy. Supine, all the Pleshettes achieved equality. Only the therapist reigned above, in his Eames chair.

At the end of the war, Harvey had been stationed in Paris with the U.S. Army. It was a time he liked to talk about, his exuberant recollections of
les femmes parisiennes
often causing Moira’s expression to grow pinched. “I was twenty-two and a lieutenant in the American army. We had the run of the place. We’d liberated Paris and it was ours! I had my own driver. We used to motor along the avenues handing out stockings and chocolate bars. That was all it took.” Every four or five years, the Pleshettes went back to France to tour the paternal war sites. In a sense, by coming to Paris now at the same age, Larry was reenacting his father’s youth, back when the Americans had marched into the city.

That was no longer the case. There was nothing American about the avenue they were trudging along. Up ahead, a billboard advertised a film called
Beau-père
, the poster showing a teenage girl, topless, in her father’s lap. Larry walked by without noticing.

It would be years before Mitchell developed an understanding of the layout of Paris, years before he could deploy the word
arrondissement
, much less learn that the numbered districts were laid out in a spiral. He was used to grid cities. That the First Arrondissement might rub up against the Thirteenth, without the Fourth or Fifth getting in between, would have been inconceivable to him.

Claire lived not far from the Eiffel Tower, however, and, later on, Mitchell would calculate that her apartment had been in the fashionable Seventh, and that it must have been expensive.

Her street, when they managed to find it, was a cobblestone relic of medieval Paris. The sidewalk was too narrow to navigate with their packs, so they had to walk in the street, past the toy cars.

The name on the bell was “Thierry.” Larry pressed it. After a long delay, the lock buzzed. Mitchell, who’d been resting against the door, tumbled into the lobby as it opened.

“Walk much?” Larry said.

Back on his feet, Mitchell stood aside to let Larry enter, then hip-checked him back down the front steps, and went in first.

“Fuck you, Mitchell,” Larry said in a tone almost of affection.

Like snails hauling their shells, they slowly ascended the staircase. It got darker the higher they climbed. On the sixth floor they waited in near-total blackness until a door at one end opened and Claire Schwartz stepped into the frame of light.

She was holding a book, her expression more that of a library patron who’d been momentarily distracted than that of a girl eagerly awaiting her boyfriend’s arrival from across the sea. Her long honey-colored hair was hanging down in front of her face, but she ran her hand through it, tucking a portion behind her right ear. This seemed to make her face once again available for emotion. She smiled and cried out, “Hi, hon!”

“Hi, hon,” Larry responded, hurrying to her.

Claire was three inches taller than Larry. She bent her knees while they embraced. Mitchell hung back in the shadows until they were finished.

Finally, Claire noticed him and said, “Oh, hi. Come on in.”

Claire was two years younger than they were, still a junior in college. Larry had met her at a summer theater workshop at SUNY Purchase—he was doing theater, she was studying French—and this was the first time that Mitchell had met her. She was wearing a peasant blouse, blue jeans, and long multiform earrings that resembled miniature wind chimes. Her rainbow-colored socks had individual toes. The book she was holding was called
New French Feminisms
.

Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels. The apartment she was subletting wasn’t the usual
chambre de bonne
, with a fold-down bed and a shared WC in the hall, of a visiting student. It was tastefully furnished with framed paintings, a dining table, and a kilim rug. After Mitchell and Larry had taken off their packs, Claire asked them if they wanted coffee.

“I’m dying for coffee,” Larry said.

“I make it with a
pression
,” Claire said.

“That’s fabulous,” Larry said.

As soon as Claire put down her book and stepped into the kitchen, Mitchell gave Larry a look. “Hi,
hon
?” he whispered.

Larry looked back at him evenly.

It was painfully clear that, if Mitchell hadn’t been there, Claire wouldn’t be making coffee. If Larry and Claire were alone, they would already be having reunion sex. Under other circumstances, Mitchell would have made himself scarce. But he didn’t know anybody in Paris and had nowhere to go.

He did the next best thing, which was to turn and stare out the window.

Here, momentarily, things improved. The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn’t clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

Turning from the window, Mitchell looked around the apartment again and realized something troubling: there was no place for him to sleep. Come nighttime, Claire and Larry would climb into the only bed together, leaving Mitchell to roll out his sleeping bag on the floor in front of it. They would turn out the lights. As soon as they thought he was asleep, they would begin fooling around, and for the next hour or so, Mitchell would be forced to listen to his friend getting laid five feet away.

He picked up
New French Feminisms
from the nearby dining table.

The austere cover bore a regiment of names. Julia Kristeva. Hélène Cixous. Kate Millett. Mitchell had seen lots of girls at school reading
New French Feminisms
, but he’d never seen a guy reading it. Not even Larry, who was small and sensitive and into all things French, had read it.

Suddenly Claire called out excitedly, “I love that book!”

She came out of the kitchen beaming and took it from his hands. “Have you read it?”

“I was just looking at it.”

“I’m reading it for this class I’m taking. I just finished this essay by Kristeva.” She opened the book and flipped through it. Her hair fell in front of her face and she impatiently tossed it back. “I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the body, and how the body has always been associated with the feminine. So it’s interesting that, in Western religion, the body is always seen as sinful. You’re supposed to mortify the body and transcend it. But what Kristeva says is that we have to look at the body again, especially the maternal body. She’s basically a Lacanian, except she doesn’t agree that signification and language come from castration fears. Otherwise we’d all be psychotic.”

Like Larry, Claire was blond, blue-eyed, and Jewish. But whereas Larry had secular parents who didn’t go to temple even on the High Holidays and who held seders in which the
afikoman
wasn’t a matzoh but a Twinkie (the product of childish mischief years ago, which had now perversely become its own tradition), Claire’s parents were Orthodox Jews who lived by the letter of the law. Their mammoth house in Scarsdale had not two sets of plates in order to keep kosher but two separate kitchens. There were Saturdays when the maid forgot to leave lights on when the Schwartzes dwelt in darkness. Once, Claire’s younger brother had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance (Talmudic wisdom holding that a medical emergency contravened the prohibition against riding in cars on the Sabbath). Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz had refused to ride along with their writhing son, setting off instead, nearly mad with worry, for the hospital on foot.

“The whole thing about Judaism and Christianity,” Claire said, “and just about every monotheistic religion, is that they’re all patriarchal. Men made these religions up. So guess who God is? A man.”

“Watch out, Claire,” Larry said. “Mitchell was a religious studies major.”

Claire grimaced and said, “Oh, my God.”

“I’ll tell you what I learned in religious studies,” Mitchell said with a slight smile. “If you read any of the mystics, or any decent theology—Catholic, Protestant, kabbalistic—the one thing they all agree on is that God is beyond any human concept or category. That’s why Moses can’t look at Yahweh. That’s why, in Judaism, you can’t even spell out God’s name. The human mind can’t conceive what God is. God doesn’t have a sex or anything else.”

“Then why is he a man with a long white beard on the Sistine Chapel?”

“Because that’s what the masses like.”

“The masses?”

“Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.”

“You sound just like my father. Whenever I tell him how sexist Judaism is, he tells me it’s tradition. Because it’s tradition, that means it’s good. You have to live with it.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that for some people, tradition is good. For others, it’s not so important. Some people think that God reveals Himself through history, others that revelation is progressive, that maybe the rules or interpretation changes over time.”

“The whole idea of revelation is teleological and bogus.”

Back in Scarsdale, facing down her father in their Chagall-lined living room, Claire had no doubt stood just as she was standing now: feet planted apart, hands on hips, torso leaning slightly forward. Despite being irritated by her, Mitchell was also impressed—as Mr. Schwartz must also have been impressed during their arguments—with the force of Claire’s will.

He realized she was waiting for him to respond and so he said, “Bogus how?”

“The whole idea of God’s revealing ‘Himself’ through history is silly. The Jews build the temple. Then the temple gets destroyed. So the Jews have to build it again so that the Messiah shows up? The idea that God is waiting around for stuff to happen—like, if there
was
such a thing as God, he would even care what people are doing—is totally anthropocentric and so totally, totally male! Before the patriarchal religions were created, people worshipped the Goddess. The Babylonians did, the Etruscans did. The religion of the Goddess was organic and environmental—it was about the cycle of nature—as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, which are just about imposing the law and raping the land.”

Mitchell glanced at Larry to see that he was nodding in agreement. Mitchell might have nodded, too, if he were going out with Claire, but Larry looked sincerely interested in the Goddess of the Babylonians.

“If you dislike a conception of God as masculine,” Mitchell said to Claire, “why replace it with one that’s feminine? Why not get rid of the whole idea of a gendered divinity?”

“Because it
is
gendered. It
is
. Already. Do you know what a mikva is?” She turned to Larry. “Does he know what a mikva is?”

“I know what a mikva is,” Mitchell said.

“O.K., so my mom goes to a mikva every month after her period, right? To cleanse herself. To cleanse herself from what? From the power to give birth? To create life? They turn the greatest power a woman has into something they should be ashamed about.”

“I agree with you, that’s absurd.”

“But it’s not about the mikva. The whole institutionalized form of Western religion is all about telling women they’re inferior, unclean, and subordinate to men. And if you actually believe in any of that stuff, I don’t know what to say.”

“You’re not having your period right now, are you?” Mitchell said.

Claire’s expressive face went blank. “I can’t believe you just said that,” she said.

“I was just kidding,” Mitchell said. His face was suddenly hot.

“What a total sexist thing to say.”

“I was
kidding
,” he repeated, his voice tight.

“You have to get to know Mitchell,” Larry said. “He’s an acquired taste.”

“I’m in agreement with you!” Mitchell tried again with Claire, but the more he protested, the more insincere he sounded, and finally he shut up.

There was one bright side to the day: since it still felt like the middle of the night for Larry and Mitchell, there was no reason not to start drinking immediately. By early afternoon they were in the Luxembourg Gardens, sharing a bottle of
vin de table
. The sky had grown cloudy, casting the flowers and yellow gravel paths in a sharp gray light. Old men were playing boules nearby, bending at the knee and releasing silver balls from their fingertips. The balls made pleasant clicks when they struck one another. The sound of satisfactory, social democratic retirement.

Claire had changed into a sundress and a pair of sandals. She didn’t shave her legs, and the hair on them was slight and blond, tapering out at her thighs. She seemed to have forgiven Mitchell. He, in turn, was doing his best to be likeable.

Under the influence of the wine Mitchell began to feel happier, his jet lag in temporary remission. They walked down to the Seine, across the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens. Sanitation workers were sweeping the parks and sweeping the curbs, their uniforms impossibly clean.