The Marriage Plot (8 page)

“How very female of you,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Cottage cheese.”

“I like cottage cheese.”

“Are you on a diet? You don’t look like someone on a diet.”

“Why do you want to know?” Madeleine said.

And here, for the first time, Leonard appeared rattled. Beneath the line of the bandanna, his face colored, and he spun away, breaking eye contact. “Just curious,” he said.

In the next second, he spun back, resuming the previous conversation. “Derrida’s supposed to be a lot clearer in French,” he said. “Rumor has it his prose in French is limpid.”

“Maybe I should read it in French, then.”

“You know French?” Leonard said, sounding impressed.

“I’m not great. I can read Flaubert.”

It was then that Madeleine made a big mistake. Things were going so well with Leonard, the mood was so promising—even the weather lending a hand because, after they finished their food and left the diner, walking back to campus, a March drizzle forced them to share Madeleine’s collapsible umbrella—that a feeling came over her like those she’d had as a girl when treated to a pastry or a dessert, a happiness so fraught by an awareness of its brevity that she took the tiniest bites, making the cream puff or éclair last as long as possible. In this same way, instead of seeing where the afternoon led, Madeleine decided to check its progress, to save some for later, and she told Leonard she had to go home and study.

They didn’t kiss goodbye. They didn’t come close to it. Leonard, hunching under the umbrella, abruptly said “Bye” and hurried off through the rain, keeping his head down. Madeleine went back to the Narragansett. She lay down on her bed, and didn’t move for a long time.

The days dragged until the next meeting of Sem 211. Madeleine arrived early, choosing a seat at the seminar table next to Leonard’s usual spot. But when he showed up, ten minutes late, he took an available chair next to the professor. He didn’t say anything in class or glance in Madeleine’s direction even once. His face looked swollen and there was a line of blemishes running down one cheek. When the class ended, Leonard was the first one out the door.

The next week he missed class entirely.

And so Madeleine was left to contend with semiotics, and with Zipperstein and his disciples, all by herself.

By now they had moved on to Derrida’s
Of Grammatology
. The Derrida went like this: “In that sense, it is the
Aufhebung
of other writings, particularly of hieroglyphic script and of the Leibnizian characteristic that had been criticized previously through one and the same gesture.” In poetic moods, the Derrida went like this: “What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis.”

Since Derrida claimed that language, by its very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote, Madeleine wondered how Derrida expected her to get his meaning. Maybe he didn’t. That was why he deployed so much arcane terminology, so many loop-de-looping clauses. That was why he said what he said in sentences it took a minute to identify the subjects of. (Could “the access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality” really be a subject?)

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something—anything,
The House of Mirth
,
Daniel Deronda
—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

Then, too, there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

The next Thursday, Madeleine came to class wearing a Norwegian sweater with a snowflake design. She’d gone back to her glasses. For the second week in a row, Leonard didn’t show up. Madeleine worried that he’d dropped the class, but it was too late in the semester to do that. Zipperstein said, “Has anybody seen Mr. Bankhead? Is he sick?” Nobody knew. Thurston arrived with a girl named Cassandra Hart, both of them sniffly and heroin-pale. Taking out a black Flair pen, Thurston wrote on Cassandra’s bare shoulder, “Not Real Skin.”

Zipperstein was in a lively mood. He’d just returned from a conference in New York, dressed differently than usual. Listening to him talk about the paper he’d given at the New School, Madeleine suddenly understood. Semiotics was the form Zipperstein’s midlife crisis had taken. Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his classes. Instead of leaving his wife, Zipperstein had left the English department. Instead of buying a sports car, he’d bought deconstruction.

He sat at the seminar table now and started speaking:

“I hope you read the
Semiotext(e)
for this week. Apropos of Lyotard, and in homage to Gertrude Stein, let me suggest the following: the thing about desire is that there is no there there.”

That was it. That was Zipperstein’s prompt. He sat before them, blinking, waiting for somebody to reply. He appeared to have all the patience in the world.

Madeleine had wanted to know what semiotics was. She’d wanted to know what the fuss was about. Well, now she felt she knew.

But then, in Week Ten, for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense.

It was a Friday night in April, just past eleven, and Madeleine was in bed, reading. The assigned text for that week was Roland Barthes’
A Lover’s Discourse
. For a book purportedly about love, it didn’t look very romantic. The cover was a somber chocolate brown, the title turquoise. There was no author photograph and only a sketchy bio, listing Barthes’ other works.

Madeleine had the book in her lap. With her right hand she was eating peanut butter straight from the jar. The spoon fit perfectly against the curve of her upper palate, allowing the peanut butter to dissolve creamily against her tongue.

Opening to the introduction, she began to read:

The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.

Outside, the temperature, which had remained cold through March, had shot up into the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks puddling, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.

Madeleine had her windows open on the liquid darkness. She sucked the spoon and read on:

What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others: around the figure, the players pass the handkerchief which sometimes, by a final parenthesis, is held a second longer before handing it on. (Ideally, the book would be a cooperative: “To the United Readers and Lovers.”)

It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’ made immediate sense. It wasn’t only the relief at recognizing that here, finally, was a book she might write her final paper on. What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.

It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.

In recent days, from her solitude, Madeleine had sent out feelers. She talked about Semiotics 211 with her roommates, mentioning Thurston, Cassandra, and Leonard. It turned out that Abby knew Leonard from her freshman year.

“What was he like?” Madeleine asked.

“Sort of intense. Really smart, but intense. He used to call me all the time. Like every day.”

“Did he like you?”

“No, he just wanted to talk. He’d keep me on the phone for an hour.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Everything! His relationship. My relationship. His parents, my parents. Jimmy Carter getting attacked by that swamp rabbit, which he was obsessed about. He’d go on and on.”

“Who was he going out with?”

“Some girl named Mindy. But then they broke up. That’s when he
really
started calling me. He’d call like six times a day. He was always going on about how good Mindy smelled. She had this smell that was supposedly perfectly compatible to Leonard,
chemically
. He was worried no girl would ever smell right to him again. I told him it was probably her moisturizer. He said no, it was her
skin
. It was
chemically perfect
. That’s what he’s like.” She paused and gave Madeleine a searching look. “Why are you asking? Do you like him?”

“I just know him from class,” Madeleine said.

“Do you want me to invite him for dinner?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’ll invite him to dinner,” Abby said.

The dinner had been on Tuesday night, three days ago. Leonard had come politely bearing a gift, a set of dish towels. He’d dressed up, wearing a white shirt with a skinny necktie, his long hair gathered in a masculine ponytail like a Scottish warrior. He was touchingly sincere, saying hello to Abby, handing her the wrapped gift and thanking her for the invitation.

Madeleine tried not to seem overeager. At dinner, she paid attention to Brian Weeger, whose breath had a dog-food smell. A couple of times, when she looked over at Leonard, he stared back, fixedly, appearing almost upset. Later, when Madeleine was in the kitchen, rinsing dishes, Leonard came in. She turned to find him inspecting a bump on the wall.

“This must be an old gas main,” he said.

Madeleine looked at the bump, which had been painted over many times.

“They used to have gas lamps in these old places,” Leonard went on. “They probably used to pump the gas up from the basement. If anybody’s pilot blew out, on any floor, you’d have a leak. Gas didn’t have an odor back then, either. They didn’t start adding methyl mercaptan until later.”

“Good to know,” Madeleine said.

“This place must have been a powder keg.” Leonard tapped the jutting object with his fingernail, turned, and looked Madeleine meaningfully in the face.

“I haven’t been going to class,” he said.

“I know.”

Leonard’s head was way up above her, but then he bent down, in a peaceful, leaf-eater motion, and said, “I haven’t been feeling well.”

“Were you sick?”

“I’m better now.”

In the living room Olivia called out, “Who wants some Delamain? It’s yummy!”

“I want some,” Brian Weeger said. “That stuff’s killer.”

Leonard said, “Were the dish towels all right?”

“What?”

“The dish towels. I bought you some dish towels.”

“Oh, they’re great,” Madeleine said. “They’re perfect. We’ll use them! Thank you.”

“I would have brought wine, or scotch, but that’s the kind of thing my father would do.”

“You don’t want to do anything your father would do?”

Leonard’s face and voice remained solemn as he replied, “My father is a depressive who self-medicates with alcohol. My mother is more or less the same.”

“Where do they live?”

“They’re divorced. My mother still lives in Portland, where I’m from. My dad’s in Europe. He lives in Antwerp. Last time I heard.”

This interchange was encouraging, in a way. Leonard was sharing personal information. On the other hand, the information indicated that he had a troubled relationship with his parents, who were themselves troubled, and Madeleine made a point of going out only with guys who liked their parents.

“What does
your
father do?” Leonard asked.

Caught off guard, Madeleine hesitated. “He used to work at a college,” she said. “He’s retired.”

“What was he? Professor?”

“He was the president.”

Leonard’s face twitched. “Oh.”

“It’s just a small college. In New Jersey. It’s called Baxter.”

Abby came in to get some glasses. Leonard helped her get them off the top shelf. When she was gone, he turned back to Madeleine and said, as if in pain, “There’s a Fellini film playing at the Cable Car this weekend.
Amarcord
.”

Madeleine gazed encouragingly up at him. There were all kinds of outmoded, novelistic words to describe how she was feeling, words like
aflutter
. But she had her rules. One rule was that the guy had to ask her out, not the other way around.

“I think it’s playing on Saturday,” Leonard said.

“This Saturday?”

“Do you like Fellini?”

To reply to this question did not, in Madeleine’s view, compromise her rule. “You want to know something embarrassing?” she said. “I’ve never seen a Fellini film.”

“You should see one,” Leonard said. “I’ll call you.”

“All right.”

“Do I have your number? Oh, right, I have it. It’s the same as Abby’s number.”

“Do you want me to write it down?” Madeleine asked.

“No,” Leonard said. “I have it.”

And he rose, brontosaurus-like, to his place among the treetops.

For the rest of the week, Madeleine stayed in every night, waiting for Leonard to call. When she came back from classes in the afternoon she interrogated her roommates to find out if he had called while she was out.