The Marriage Plot (6 page)

At the first meeting of Acting Workshop, Professor Churchill, a bald bullfrog of a man, asked the students to say something about themselves. Half the people in the class were theater majors, serious about acting or directing. Madeleine mumbled something about loving Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill.

Dabney Carlisle stood up and said, “I’ve done a little modeling work, down in New York. My agent suggested I should take some acting lessons. So here I am.”

The modeling he’d done consisted of a single magazine ad, showing a group of Leni Riefenstahl–ish athletes in boxer briefs, standing in a receding line on a beach whose black volcanic sand steamed around their marble feet. Madeleine didn’t see the photograph until she and Dabney were already going out, when Dabney gingerly took it out of the bartending manual where he kept it safely pressed. She was inclined to make fun of it but something reverential in Dabney’s expression stopped her. And so she asked where the beach had been (Montauk) and why it was so black (it wasn’t) and how much he’d gotten paid (“four figures”) and what the other guys were like (“total a-holes”) and if he was wearing the underpants right now. It was sometimes difficult, with boys, to take an interest in the things that interested them. But with Dabney she wished it had been curling, she longed for it to be the model UN, anything but male modeling. This, anyway, was the authentic emotion she now identified herself as having felt. At the time—Dabney cautioned her against touching the ad before he got it laminated—Madeleine had rehearsed in her mind the standard arguments: that though objectification was de facto bad, the emergence of the idealized male form in the mass media scored a point for equality; that if men started getting objectified and started worrying about their looks and their bodies, they might begin to understand the burden women had been living with since forever, and might therefore be sensitized to these issues of the body. She even went so far as to admire Dabney for his courage in allowing himself to be photographed in snug little gray underpants.

Looking the way Madeleine and Dabney did, it was inevitable that they would be cast as romantic leads in the scenes the workshop performed. Madeleine was Rosalind to Dabney’s wooden Orlando, Maggie to his brick-like Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. To rehearse the first time, they met at Dabney’s fraternity house. Merely stepping through the front door reinforced Madeleine’s aversion to places like Sigma Chi. It was around ten on a Sunday morning. The vestiges of the previous evening’s “Hawaiian Night” were still there to see—the lei hanging from the antlers of the moose head on the wall, the plastic “grass” skirt trampled on the beer-sodden floor, a skirt that, should Madeleine succumb to the outrageous good looks of Dabney Carlisle, she might, at a minimum, have to watch some drunken slut hula in to the baying of the brothers, or, at a maximum (for mai tais made you do crazy things), might even don herself, up in Dabney’s room, for his pleasure alone. On the low-slung couch two Sigma Chi members were watching TV. At Madeleine’s appearance, they stirred, rising out of the gloom like openmouthed carp. She hurried to the back stairs, thinking the things she always thought when it came to frats and frat guys: that their appeal stemmed from a primitive need for protection (one thought of Neanderthal clans banding together against other Neanderthal clans); that the hazing the pledges underwent (being stripped and blindfolded and left in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel with bus fare taped to their genitals) enacted the very fears of male rape and emasculation that membership in the fraternity promised protection against; that any guy who longed to join a frat suffered from insecurities that poisoned his relationships with women; that there was something seriously wrong with homophobic guys who centered their lives around a homoerotic bond; that the stately mansions maintained by generations of dues-paying fraternity members were in reality sites for date rape and problem drinking; that frats always smelled bad; that you didn’t ever want to shower in one; that only freshman girls were stupid enough to go to frat parties; that Kelly Traub had slept with a Sigma Delt guy who kept saying, “Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it, now you don’t”; that such a thing wasn’t going to happen to her, to Madeleine, ever.

What she hadn’t expected when it came to a fraternity was a sunny-haired silent type like Dabney, learning his lines in a folding chair, in parachute pants, shoeless. Looking back on their relationship, Madeleine figured she’d had no choice. Dabney and she had been selected for each other in a Royal Wedding kind of way. She was Prince Charles to his Princess Di. She knew he couldn’t act. Dabney had the artistic soul of a third-string tight end. In life Dabney moved and said little. Onstage he moved not at all but had to say a lot. His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate.

Acting opposite Dabney made Madeleine more stiff and nervous than she already was. She wanted to do scenes with the talented kids in the workshop. She suggested interesting bits from
The Vietnamization of New Jersey
and Mamet’s
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
, but got no takers. Nobody wanted to lower his or her average by acting with her.

Dabney didn’t let it bother him. “Bunch of little shits in that class,” he said. “They’ll never get any print work, much less movies.”

He was more laconic than she liked her boyfriends to be. He had the wit of a store mannequin. But Dabney’s physical perfection pushed these realities out of her mind. She’d never been in a relationship where she wasn’t the more attractive partner. It was slightly intimidating. But she could handle it. At three a.m., while Dabney lay sleeping beside her, Madeleine found she was up to the task of inventorying each abdominal cord, every hard lump of muscle. She enjoyed applying calipers to Dabney’s waist to measure his body fat. Underwear modeling was all about the abs, Dabney said, and the abs were all about sit-ups and diet. The pleasure Madeleine got from looking at Dabney was reminiscent of the pleasure she’d gotten as a girl from looking at sleek hunting dogs. Underneath this pleasure, like the coals that fed it, was a fierce need to enfold Dabney and siphon off his strength and beauty. It was all very primitive and evolutionary and felt fantastic. The problem was that she hadn’t been able to allow herself to enjoy Dabney or even to exploit him a little, but had had to go and be a total girl about it and convince herself that she was in love with him. Madeleine required emotion, apparently. She disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

And so she began to tell herself that Dabney’s acting was “restrained” or “economical.” She appreciated that Dabney was “secure about himself” and “didn’t need to prove anything” and wasn’t a “showoff.” Instead of worrying that he was dull, Madeleine decided he was gentle. Instead of thinking he was poorly read, she called him intuitive. She exaggerated Dabney’s mental abilities in order not to feel shallow for wanting his body. To this end she helped Dabney write—O.K., she wrote—English and anthro papers for him and, when he got A’s, felt confirmed of his intelligence. She sent him off to modeling auditions in New York with good-luck kisses and listened to him complain bitterly about the “faggots” who hadn’t hired his services. It turned out that Dabney wasn’t so beautiful. Among the truly beautiful he was only so-so. He couldn’t even smile right.

At the end of the semester, the acting students met separately with the professor for a critical review. Churchill welcomed Madeleine with a wolfish yellow grin, then sat back jowly and deliberate in his chair.

“I’ve enjoyed having you in the class, Madeleine,” he said. “But you can’t act.”

“Don’t hold back,” Madeleine said, chastened but laughing. “Give it to me straight.”

“You have a good feel for language, for Shakespeare especially. But your voice is reedy and you look worried onstage. Your forehead has a perpetual crease. A vocal coach could go a long way toward helping your instrument. But I worry about your worrying. You’ve got it right now. The crease.”

“It’s called thinking.”

“Which is fine. If you’re playing Eleanor Roosevelt. Or Golda Meir. But those parts don’t come around very often.”

Churchill, steepling his fingers, continued, “I’d be more diplomatic if I thought this meant a lot to you. But I get the feeling you don’t want to be a professional actress, do you?”

“No,” Madeleine said.

“Good. You’re lovely. You’re bright. The world is your oyster. Go with my blessings.”

When Dabney returned from his review with Churchill, he looked even more self-contented than usual.

“So?” Madeleine asked. “How did it go?”

“He says I’m perfect for soaps.”

“Soap commercials?”

Dabney looked peeved. “
Days of Our Lives
.
General Hospital
. Ever heard of those?”

“Did he mean that as a compliment?”

“How else could he mean it? Soap actors have it made! They work every day, make great money, and never have to travel. I’ve been wasting my time trying to get all this advertising work. Screw that. I’m going to tell my agent to start lining up some auditions for soaps.”

Madeleine was silent at this news. She’d assumed Dabney’s enthusiasm for modeling was temporary, a tuition-earning scheme. Now she realized he was in earnest. She was, in fact, dating a model.

“What are you thinking?” Dabney asked her.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Just that—I don’t know—but I doubt Prof. Churchill has that high of an opinion of the acting on
Days of Our Lives
.”

“What did he tell us the first class? He said he was giving a workshop in acting. For people who wanted to work in the theater.”

“In the theater doesn’t mean …”

“What did he tell
you
? Did he say you were going to be a movie star?”

“He told me I couldn’t act,” Madeleine said.

“He did, huh?” Dabney put his hands in his pockets, leaning back on his heels as if relieved not to have to deliver this verdict himself. “Is that why you’re so pissed off? And have to tear down my crit?”

“I’m not tearing down your crit. I’m just not sure you got Churchill’s meaning, exactly.”

Dabney let out a bitter laugh. “I wouldn’t get it right, would I? I’m too dumb. I’m just some dumb jock you have to write English papers for.”

“I don’t know. You seem to have a pretty good grasp of sarcasm.”

“Man, am I ever lucky,” Dabney said. “What would I do if you weren’t around? You have to catch all the subtleties for me, don’t you? You and your flair for catching subtleties. It must be nice to be rich and sit around all day catching subtleties. What do you know about needing to make a living? It’s fine for you to make fun of my ad. You didn’t get into college on a football scholarship. And now you have to come in here and run me down. You know what? This is bullshit. This is total bullshit. I’m sick of your condescension and your superiority complex. And Churchill’s right. You can’t act.”

In the end Madeleine had to admit that Dabney was far more fluent than she’d ever expected. He was capable of portraying a range of emotions, too, anger, disgust, wounded pride, and of simulating others, including affection, passion, and love. He had a great career in the soaps ahead of him.

Madeleine and Dabney had broken up in May, right before summer, and there was no better time than summer to forget about somebody. She’d gone straight down to Prettybrook the day she finished her last exam. For once she was glad to have such sociable parents. With all the cocktail parties and convivial dinners on Wilson Lane there was little time to dwell on herself. In July, she got an internship at a nonprofit poetry organization on the Upper East Side and began riding the train into the city. Madeleine’s job was to oversee submissions for the annual New Voices award, which involved making sure that the submissions were complete before sending them off to the judge (Howard Nemerov, that year). Madeleine wasn’t particularly technical, but because everyone else in the office was even less so, she ended up being the go-to person whenever the copier or the dot-matrix printer malfunctioned. Her coworker Brenda would come up to Madeleine’s desk at least once a week and ask in a babyish voice, “Can you help me? The printer’s not being nice.” The only part of the day Madeleine enjoyed was her lunch hour, when she got to walk around the muggy, stinking, thrilling streets, eat quiche in a French bistro as narrow as a bowling alley, and stare at the styles women her age or a little older were wearing. When the one straight guy at the nonprofit asked her to have a drink after work, Madeleine cooly answered, “Sorry, I can’t,” trying not to feel bad about hurting his feelings, trying to think about her own feelings for a change.

She arrived back at college for her senior year, then, intent on being studious, career-oriented, and aggressively celibate. Casting a wide net, Madeleine sent away for applications to Yale grad school (English Language and Literature), an organization for teaching English in China, and an advertising internship at Foote, Cone & Belding, in Chicago. She studied for the GRE using a sample booklet. The verbal section was easy. The math required brushing up on her high school algebra. The logic problems, however, were a defeat to the spirit. “At the annual dancers’ ball a number of dancers performed their favorite dance with their favorite partners. Alan danced the tango, while Becky watched the waltz. James and Charlotte were fantastic together. Keith was magnificent during his foxtrot and Simon excelled at the rumba. Jessica danced with Alan. But Laura did not dance with Simon. Can you determine who danced with whom and which dance they each enjoyed?” Logic wasn’t something Madeleine had been expressly taught. It seemed unfair to be asked about it. She did as the book suggested, diagramming the problems, placing Alan, Becky, James, Charlotte, Keith, Simon, Jessica, and Laura on the dance floor of her scrap paper, and pairing them according to the instructions. But their complicated transit wasn’t a subject Madeleine’s mind naturally followed. She wanted to know why James and Charlotte were fantastic together, and if Jessica and Alan were going out, and why Laura wouldn’t dance with Simon, and if Becky was upset, watching.