The Marriage Plot (3 page)

Madeleine shifted her weight, wrinkling her face unhappily. “Look. I’m really hungover. I barely slept last night. My parents have been here about ten minutes and they’re already driving me crazy. So if you could just come over and say hello, that would be great.”

Mitchell’s large emotional eyes blinked twice. He was wearing a vintage gabardine shirt, dark wool pants, and beat-up wingtips. Madeleine had never seen him in shorts or tennis shoes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About what happened.”

“Fine,” Madeleine said, looking away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I was just being my usual vile self.”

“So was I.”

They were quiet a moment. Madeleine felt Mitchell’s eyes on her, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

What had happened was this: one night the previous December, in a state of anxiety about her romantic life, Madeleine had run into Mitchell on campus and brought him back to her apartment. She’d needed male attention and had flirted with him, without entirely admitting it to herself. In her bedroom, Mitchell had picked up a jar of deep-heating gel on her desk, asking what it was for. Madeleine had explained that people who were
athletic
sometimes got sore muscles. She understood that Mitchell might not have experienced this phenomenon, seeing as all he did was sit in the library, but he should take her word for it. At that point, Mitchell had come up behind her and wiped a gob of heating gel behind her ear. Madeleine jumped up, shouting at Mitchell, and wiped the gunk off with a T-shirt. Though she was within her rights to be angry, Madeleine also knew (even at the time) that she was using the incident as a pretext for getting Mitchell out of her bedroom and for covering up the fact that she’d been flirting with him in the first place. The worst part of the incident was how stricken Mitchell had looked, as if he’d been about to cry. He kept saying he was sorry, he was just joking around, but she ordered him to leave. In the following days, replaying the incident in her mind, Madeleine had felt worse and worse about it. She’d been on the verge of calling Mitchell to apologize when she’d received a letter from him, a highly detailed, cogently argued, psychologically astute, quietly hostile four-page letter, in which he called her a “cocktease” and claimed that her behavior that night had been “the erotic equivalent of bread and circus, with just the circus.” The next time they’d run into each other, Madeleine had acted as if she didn’t know him, and they hadn’t spoken since.

Now, in the churchyard of First Baptist, Mitchell looked up at her and said, “O.K. Let’s go say hello to your parents.”

Phyllida was waving as they came up the steps. In the flirtatious voice she reserved for her favorite of Madeleine’s friends, she called out, “I thought that was you on the ground. You looked like a swami!”

“Congratulations, Mitchell!” Alton said, heartily shaking Mitchell’s hand. “Big day today. One of the milestones. A new generation takes the reins.”

They invited Mitchell to sit down and asked him if he wanted anything to eat. Madeleine went back to the counter to get more coffee, glad to have Mitchell keeping her parents occupied. As she watched him, in his old man’s clothes, engaging Alton and Phyllida in conversation, Madeleine thought to herself, as she’d thought many times before, that Mitchell was the kind of smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy she should fall in love with and marry. That she would never fall in love with Mitchell and marry him, precisely because of this eligibility, was yet another indication, in a morning teeming with them, of just how screwed up she was in matters of the heart.

When she returned to the table, no one acknowledged her.

“So, Mitchell,” Phyllida was asking, “what are your plans after graduation?”

“My father’s been asking me the same question,” Mitchell answered. “For some reason he thinks Religious Studies isn’t a marketable degree.”

Madeleine smiled for the first time all day. “See? Mitchell doesn’t have a job lined up, either.”

“Well, I sort of do,” Mitchell said.

“You do not,” Madeleine challenged him.

“I’m serious. I do.” He explained that he and his roommate, Larry Pleshette, had come up with a plan to fight the recession. As liberal-arts degree holders matriculating into the job market at a time when unemployment was at 9.5 percent, they had decided, after much consideration, to leave the country and stay away as long as possible. At the end of the summer, after they’d saved up enough money, they were going to backpack through Europe. After they’d seen everything in Europe there was to see, they were going to fly to India and stay there as long as their money held out. The whole trip would take eight or nine months, maybe as long as a year.

“You’re going to India?” Madeleine said. “That’s not a job.”

“We’re going to be research assistants,” Mitchell said. “For Prof. Hughes.”

“Prof. Hughes in the theater department?”

“I saw a program about India recently,” Phyllida said. “It was terribly depressing. The poverty!”

“That’s a plus for me, Mrs. Hanna,” Mitchell said. “I thrive in squalor.”

Phyllida, who couldn’t resist this sort of mischief, gave up her solemnity, rippling with amusement. “Then you’re going to the right place!”

“Maybe I’ll take a trip, too,” Madeleine said in a threatening tone.

No one reacted. Instead Alton asked Mitchell, “What sort of immunizations do you need for India?”

“Cholera and typhus. Gamma globulin’s optional.”

Phyllida shook her head. “Your mother must be worried sick.”

“When I was in the service,” Alton said, “they shot us up with a million things. Didn’t even tell us what the shots were for.”

“I think
I’ll
move to Paris,” Madeleine said in a louder voice. “Instead of getting a job.”

“Mitchell,” Phyllida continued, “with your interest in religious studies, I’d think India would be a perfect fit. They’ve got everything. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jains, Buddhists. It’s like Baskin and Robbins! I’ve always been fascinated by religion. Unlike my doubting-Thomas husband.”

Alton winked. “I doubt that doubting Thomas existed.”

“Do you know Paul Moore,
Bishop
Moore, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine?” Phyllida said, keeping Mitchell’s attention. “He’s a great friend. You might find it interesting to meet him. We’d be happy to introduce you. When we’re in the city, I always go to services at the cathedral. Have you ever been there? Oh. Well. How can I describe it? It’s simply—well, simply
divine
!”

Phyllida held a hand to her throat with the pleasure of this bon mot, while Mitchell obligingly, even convincingly, laughed.

“Speaking of religious dignitaries,” Alton cut in, “did I ever tell you about the time we met the Dalai Lama? It was at this fund-raiser at the Waldorf. We were in the receiving line. Must have been three hundred people at least. Anyway, when we finally got up to the Dalai Lama, I asked him, ‘Are you any relation to Dolly Parton?’”

“I was mortified!” Phyllida cried. “Absolutely mortified.”

“Daddy,” Madeleine said, “you’re going to be late.”

“What?”

“You should get going if you want to get a good spot.”

Alton looked at his watch. “We’ve still got an hour.”

“It gets really crowded,” Madeleine emphasized. “You should go now.”

Alton and Phyllida looked at Mitchell, as if they trusted him to advise them. Under the table, Madeleine kicked him, and he alertly responded, “It does get pretty crowded.”

“Where’s the best place to stand?” Alton asked, again addressing Mitchell.

“By the Van Wickle Gates. At the top of College Street. That’s where we’ll come through.”

Alton stood up from the table. After shaking Mitchell’s hand, he bent to kiss Madeleine on the cheek. “We’ll see
you
later. Miss Baccalaureate, 1982.”

“Congratulations, Mitchell,” Phyllida said. “
So
nice to see you. And remember, when you’re on your Grand Tour, be sure to send your mother
loads
of letters. Otherwise, she’ll be frantic.”

To Madeleine, she said, “You might change that dress before the march. It has a visible stain.”

With that, Alton and Phyllida, in their glaring parental actuality, all seersucker and handbag, cuff links and pearls, crossed the beige-and-brick space of Carr House and went out the door.

As though to signal their departure, a new song came on: Joe Jackson’s high-pitched voice swooping above a synthesized drumbeat. The guy behind the counter cranked up the volume.

Madeleine laid her head on the table, her hair covering her face.

“I’m never drinking again,” she said.

“Famous last words.”

“You have no idea what’s been going on with me.”

“How could I? You haven’t been speaking to me.”

Without lifting her cheek from the table, Madeleine said in a pitiful voice, “I’m homeless. I’m graduating from college and I’m a homeless person.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I am!” Madeleine insisted. “First I was supposed to move to New York with Abby and Olivia. Then it looked like I was moving to the Cape, though, so I told them to get another roommate. And now I’m
not
moving to the Cape and I have nowhere to go. My mother wants me to move back home but I’d rather kill myself.”

“I’m moving back home for the summer,” Mitchell said. “To
Detroit.
At least you’re near New York.”

“I haven’t heard back from grad school yet and it’s
June
,” Madeleine continued. “I was supposed to find out over a month ago! I could call the admissions department, but I don’t because I’m scared to find out that I’ve been rejected. As long as I don’t know, I still have hope.”

There was a moment before Mitchell spoke again. “You can come to India with me,” he said.

Madeleine opened one eye to see, through a whorl in her hair, that Mitchell wasn’t entirely joking.

“It’s not even about grad school,” she said. Taking a deep breath, she confessed, “Leonard and I broke up.”

It felt deeply pleasurable to say this, to name her sadness, and so Madeleine was surprised by the coldness of Mitchell’s reply.

“Why are you telling me this?” he said.

She lifted her head, brushing her hair out of her face. “I don’t know. You wanted to know what was the matter.”

“I didn’t, actually. I didn’t even ask.”

“I thought you might care,” Madeleine said. “Since you’re my friend.”

“Right,” Mitchell said, his voice suddenly sarcastic. “Our wonderful friendship! Our ‘friendship’ isn’t a real friendship because it only works on your terms.
You
set the rules, Madeleine. If you decide you don’t want to talk to me for three months, we don’t talk. Then you decide you
do
want to talk to me because you need me to entertain your parents—and now we’re talking again. We’re friends when you want to be friends, and we’re never
more
than friends because you don’t want to be. And I have to go along with that.”

“I’m sorry,” Madeleine said, feeling put-upon and blindsided. “I just don’t like you that way.”

“Exactly!” Mitchell cried. “You’re not attracted to me physically. O.K., fine. But who says I was ever attracted to you
mentally
?”

Madeleine reacted as if she’d been slapped. She was outraged, hurt, and defiant all at once.

“You’re such a”—she tried to think of the worst thing to say—“you’re such a
jerk
!” She was hoping to remain imperious, but her chest was stinging, and, to her dismay, she burst into tears.

Mitchell reached out to touch her arm, but Madeleine shook him off. Getting to her feet, trying not to look like someone angrily weeping, she went out the door and down the steps onto Waterman Street. Confronted by the festive churchyard, she turned downhill toward the river. She wanted to get away from campus. Her headache had returned, her temples were throbbing, and as she looked up at the storm clouds massing over downtown like more bad things to come, she asked herself why everyone was being so mean to her.

Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love. Semiotics 211 was an upper-level seminar taught by a former English department renegade. Michael Zipperstein had come to Brown thirty-two years earlier as a New Critic. He’d inculcated the habits of close reading and biography-free interpretation into three generations of students before taking a Road to Damascus sabbatical, in Paris, in 1975, where he’d met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over cassoulet, to the new faith. Now Zipperstein taught two courses in the newly created Program in Semiotics Studies: Introduction to Semiotic Theory in the fall and, in the spring, Semiotics 211. Hygienically bald, with a seaman’s mustacheless white beard, Zipperstein favored French fisherman’s sweaters and wide-wale corduroys. He buried people with his reading lists: in addition to all the semiotic big hitters—Derrida, Eco, Barthes—the students in Semiotics 211 had to contend with a magpie nest of reserve reading that included everything from Balzac’s
Sarrasine
to issues of
Semiotext(e)
to photocopied selections from E. M. Cioran, Robert Walser, Claude Levi-Strauss, Peter Handke, and Carl Van Vechten. To get into the seminar, you had to submit to a one-on-one interview with Zipperstein during which he asked bland personal questions, such as what your favorite food or dog breed was, and made enigmatic Warholian remarks in response. This esoteric probing, along with Zipperstein’s guru’s dome and beard, gave his students a sense that they’d been spiritually vetted and were now—for two hours on Thursday afternoons, at least—part of a campus lit-crit elite.

Which was exactly what Madeleine wanted. She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. The university’s “British and American Literature Course Catalog” was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like “English 274: Lyly’s Euphues” excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. “English 450A: Hawthorne and James” filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria. Even as a girl in their house in Prettybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach—newly purchased volumes such as
Love Story
or
Myra Breckinridge
that exuded a faintly forbidden air, as well as venerable leather-bound editions of Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens—and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks. She could scan book spines for as long as an hour. Her cataloging of the family’s holdings rivaled the Dewey decimal system in its comprehensiveness. Madeleine knew right where everything was. The shelves near the fireplace held Alton’s favorites, biographies of American presidents and British prime ministers, memoirs by warmongering secretaries of state, novels about sailing or espionage by William F. Buckley, Jr. Phyllida’s books filled the left side of the bookcases leading up to the parlor,
NYRB
-reviewed novels and essay collections, as well as coffee-table volumes about English gardens or chinoiserie. Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better. She had read Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that way. She’d read James Fenimore Cooper. She’d read
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
by John P. Marquand.