The Marriage Plot (31 page)

She tried to be as quick as possible. Throwing her legs over the side of the bed, she opened the bedside table drawer and took out her diaphragm case. She removed the disk, with its rubbery smell. The spermicide tube was all crumpled up. In her haste Madeleine squeezed out too much jelly and it dripped onto her thigh. She spread her knees apart, squeezing the device into a figure eight, and inserted it deep inside her until she felt it pop open. After wiping her hand on the sheet, she rolled back to Leonard.

When he began kissing her she noticed the sour, metallic taste again, stronger than ever. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that she was no longer aroused. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they complete the act. With this in mind, she reached down to help things along, but Leonard was no longer hard. As if she hadn’t noticed, Madeleine resumed kissing him. With desperation she began to feed on Leonard’s sour mouth, trying to appear excited and to excite him in turn. But after half a minute, Leonard pulled away. He rolled heavily onto his side, facing away from her, and was silent.

A long cold moment ensued. For the first time ever, Madeleine regretted meeting Leonard. He was defective, and she wasn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it. The cruelty of this thought felt rich and sweet and Madeleine indulged in it for another minute.

But then this, too, faded away, and she felt sorry for Leonard and guilty for being so selfish. She reached over and stroked Leonard’s back. He was crying now and she tried to comfort him, saying the required things, kissing his face, telling him that she loved him, she loved him, everything was going to be fine, she loved him so much.

She curled up against him, and they both were quiet.

And then they must have fallen asleep, because when she woke again the room was dark. She got up and dressed. Putting on her peacoat, she went out of the building to the beach.

It was just after ten o’clock. The lights of the dining hall and bar were still blazing. Directly ahead of her, the quarter moon lit up shreds of clouds moving quickly over the dark bay. The wind was strong. Blowing in Madeleine’s face, it seemed personally interested in her. It had come all this way, across the continent, to deliver a message to her.

She concentrated on what the doctor at Providence Hospital had said, the one time they spoke. It often took a while to get the appropriate dosage right, she said. Side effects were typically worse at first. Given that Leonard had functioned well on lithium in the past, there was no reason he wouldn’t do so in the future. It was only a question of recalibrating the dosage. Many patients with manic depression lived long and productive lives.

She hoped all this was true. Being with Leonard made Madeleine feel exceptional. It was as if, before she’d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now it was all oxygenated and red.

She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she’d been before.

As she stood staring out at the black waves, a sound reached her ears. A soft thudding quickly approaching over the sand. Madeleine turned as a dark shape shot out, moving low to the ground. In another second she recognized Diane MacGregor’s standard poodle, galloping past. The dog’s mouth was open, tongue unfurled, her body as elongated and directed as an arrow.

A few moments later, MacGregor herself appeared.

“Your dog scared me,” Madeleine said. “It sounded like a horse.”

“I know just what you mean,” MacGregor said.

She was dressed in the same raincoat as at the press conference two weeks ago. Her gray hair was hanging limply on either side of her creased intelligent face.

“Which way did she go?” MacGregor asked.

Madeleine pointed. “She went thataway.”

MacGregor squinted into the darkness.

They stood together on the beach, feeling no need to speak further.

Finally Madeleine broke the silence. “When do you go to Sweden?”

“What? Oh, in December.” MacGregor seemed to be uninterested. “I don’t understand why the Swedes would bring anyone to Sweden in December, do you?”

“Summer would be nicer.”

“There will be hardly any daylight at all! I suppose that’s why they came up with the prizes. To give the Swedes something to do during the winter.”

Suddenly the dog sped past again, ripping up sand.

“I don’t know why it makes me so happy to watch my dog run,” MacGregor said. “It’s like a piece of me gets to hitch a ride.” She shook her head. “This is what it’s come to. Living vicariously through my poodle.”

“There are worse things.”

After a few more passes, the poodle returned, prancing in front of her owner. Noticing Madeleine, the animal went up to sniff her, and began rubbing her head against Madeleine’s legs.

“She’s not very attached to me,” MacGregor said, looking on objectively. “She’ll go to anyone. If I died, she’d forget me in a second. Wouldn’t you?” she said, calling the poodle over and scratching her vigorously under the chin. “Yes, you would. You would, you would.”

•

After they left Paris, going from France to Ireland, then back south, all the way through Andalusia and to Morocco, Mitchell began sneaking off to churches any chance he could. This was Europe and there were churches everywhere, spectacular cathedrals as well as quiet little chapels, all of them still functioning (though usually empty), each one open to a wandering pilgrim, even one like Mitchell who wasn’t sure he qualified. He went into these dark, superstitious spaces to stare at faded frescoes or crude, bloody paintings of Christ. He peered into dusty reliquary jars containing the bones of Saint Whoever. Moved, solemn, he lit votive candles, always with the same inappropriate wish: that someday, somehow, Madeleine would be his. Mitchell didn’t believe the candles worked. He was opposed to petitional prayer. But it made him feel a little better to light a candle for Madeleine and to think about her for a minute, in the peacefulness of an old Spanish church, while, outside, the sea of faith retreated “down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.”

Mitchell was perfectly aware of how strangely he was behaving. But it didn’t matter because no one was around to notice. In stiff-backed pews, smelling candle wax, he closed his eyes and sat as still as possible, opening himself up to whatever was there that might be interested in him. Maybe there was nothing. But how would you ever know if you didn’t send out a signal? That’s what Mitchell was doing: he was sending out a signal to the home office.

On the trains, buses, and boats that took them to all these places, Mitchell read the books in his backpack one by one. The mind of Thomas à Kempis, the author of
The Imitation of Christ
, was difficult to connect with. Parts of Saint Augustine’s
Confessions
, especially the information about his self-pleasuring youth and his African wife, were eye-opening.
Interior Castle
, however, by Saint Teresa of Avila, proved to be a gripping read. Mitchell devoured it on the overnight ferry ride from Le Havre to Rosslare. From the Gare St. Lazare, they’d gone to Normandy to visit the restaurant Larry had worked at during high school. After a huge lunch with the family owners, followed by a night in their house, they proceeded to Le Havre for the crossing. The seas were rough. Passengers stayed awake at the bar, or tried to sleep on the floor of the open cabin. Exploring belowdecks, Mitchell and Larry gained entry to a vacant officers’ lounge, with a Jacuzzi and beds, and amid this unwarranted luxury, Mitchell read about the soul’s progress toward mystical union with God.
Interior Castle
described a vision that Saint Teresa had had involving the soul. “I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.” At first, the soul lay in darkness outside the castle walls, plagued by the venomous snakes and stinging insects of its sins. By the power of grace, however, some souls crawled out of this swamp and knocked at the castle door. “At length they enter the first rooms of the basement of the castle, accompanied by numerous reptiles which disturb their peace, and prevent their seeing the beauty of the building; still, it is a great gain that these persons should have found their way in at all.” All night long, while the ferry pitched and rolled, and Larry slept, Mitchell read how the soul progressed through the other six mansions, edifying itself with sermons, mortifying itself by penance and fasting, performing charity, meditating, praying, going on retreats, shedding its old habits and growing more perfect, until it became betrothed to the Spouse. “When our Lord is pleased to take pity on the sufferings, both past and present, endured through her longing for Him by this soul … He, before consummating the celestial marriage, brings her into His mansion or presence chamber. This is the seventh Mansion, for as He has a dwelling-place in heaven, so has He in the soul, where none but He may abide and which may be termed a second heaven.” What struck Mitchell about the book wasn’t so much imagery like that, which seemed borrowed from the Song of Songs, but its practicality. The book was a guide for the spiritual life, told with great specificity. For instance, describing mystical union, Saint Teresa wrote: “You may fancy that such a person is beside herself and that her mind is too inebriated to care for anything else. On the contrary, she is far more active than before in all that concerns God’s service.” Or, later: “This presence is not always so entirely realized, that is, so distinctly manifest, as at first, or as it is at times when God renews his favour; otherwise the recipient could not possibly attend to anything else nor live in society.” That sounded authentic. It sounded like something that Saint Teresa, writing five hundred years ago, had experienced, as real as the garden outside her convent window in Avila. You could tell the difference between someone making things up and someone using metaphorical language to describe an ineffable, but real, experience. Just after dawn, Mitchell went up on deck. He was light-headed from sleeplessness and giddy from the book. As he stared at the gray ocean and the misty coast of Ireland, he wondered what room his soul was in.

They spent two days in Dublin. Mitchell made Larry visit the Joyce shrines, Eccles Street and the Martello tower. Larry took Mitchell to see Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theater” group. The next day, they hitchhiked to the west. Mitchell tried to pay attention to Ireland, and especially to County Cork, where his mother’s side of the family came from. But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
A Confession
was a book like that. In it, Tolstoy related a Russian fable about a man who, being chased by a monster, jumps into a well. As the man is falling down the well, however, he sees there’s a dragon at the bottom, waiting to eat him. Right then, the man notices a branch sticking out of the wall, and he grabs on to it, and hangs. This keeps the man from falling into the dragon’s jaws, or being eaten by the monster above, but it turns out there’s another little problem. Two mice, one black and one white, are scurrying around and around the branch, nibbling it. It’s only a matter of time before they will chew through the branch, causing the man to fall. As the man contemplates his inescapable fate, he notices something else: from the end of the branch he’s holding, a few drops of honey are dripping. The man sticks out his tongue to lick them. This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we’re the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.

Most of what Mitchell read in college hadn’t conveyed Wisdom with a capital
W
. But this Russian fable did. It was true about people in general and it was true about Mitchell in particular. What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summer houses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were “political” and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch.

What Larry thought about Mitchell’s reading list was unclear. Most of the time he limited his reaction to the raising of one tawny Riverdale eyebrow. Having been members of the college art scene, Larry and Mitchell were used to people undergoing radical self-transformations. Moss Runk (this was a girl) had arrived at Brown as an apple-cheeked member of the cross-country team. By junior year, she had repudiated the wearing of gender-specific clothing. Instead, she covered herself in shapeless garments that she made herself out of hot-looking thick gray felt. What you did with a person like Moss Runk, if you were Mitchell and Larry, was you pretended not to notice. When Moss came up to them in the Blue Room, moving in her hovercraft way owing to the long hem of her robe, you slid over so she could sit down. If someone asked what she was, exactly, you said, “That’s Moss!” Despite her odd clothes, Moss Runk was still the same cheerful Idahoan she’d always been. Other people thought she was weird, but not Mitchell and Larry. Whatever had led to her drastic sartorial decision was something that Mitchell and Larry didn’t inquire about. Their silence registered solidarity with Moss against all the conventional people in their down vests and Adidas sneakers who were majoring in economics or engineering, spending the last period of total freedom in their lives doing nothing the least bit unordinary. Mitchell and Larry knew that Moss Runk wasn’t going to be able to wear her androgynous outfits forever. (Another nice thing about Moss was that she wanted to be a high school principal.) There would come a day when, in order to get a job, Moss would have to hang up her gray felt and put on a skirt, or a business suit. Mitchell and Larry didn’t want to be around to see it.