The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Depression didn’t necessarily ruin a person’s looks. Only the way Leonard was moving his lips, sucking them and biting them occasionally, indicated that he was on any drugs.

  “And so you left,” he continued. “You walked out. And you were right to do that, Madeleine.” Leonard looked at her now, his face full of sorrow. “I’m damaged goods,” he said.

  “You are not.”

  “After you left that day, I lay down on my bed and didn’t get up for a week. I just lay there thinking how I’d sabotaged the best chance I ever had to be happy in life. The best chance I ever had to be with someone smart, beautiful, and sane. The kind of person I could be a team with.” He leaned forward and gazed with intensity into Madeleine’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for being the kind of person who would do a thing like that.”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” Madeleine said. “You have to concentrate on feeling better.”

  Leonard blinked three times in quick succession. “I’m going to be in here for at least another week,” he said. “I’m missing graduation.”

  “You wouldn’t have gone, anyway.”

  Here, for the first time, Leonard smiled. “You’re probably right. How was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Madeleine said. “It’s going on right now.”

  “Right now?” Leonard looked out the window, as if he could check. “You’re missing it?”

  Madeleine nodded. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

  The woman in the bathrobe who’d been lazily circling the room now zeroed in on them. Under his breath Leonard said, “Watch out for this one. She can turn on you in a second.”

  The woman shuffled closer and stopped. Bending at the knees, she appraised Madeleine closely.

  “What are you?” she said.

  “What am I?”

  “Where are your people from?”

  “England,” Madeleine said. “Originally.”

  “You look like Candice Bergen.”

  She wheeled around to grin at Leonard. “And you’re 007!”

  “Sean Connery,” Leonard said. “That’s me.”

  “You look like 007 gone all to hell!” the woman said. There was an edge to her tone. Leonard and Madeleine, playing it safe, said nothing until she moved on.

  The woman in the bathrobe belonged in here. Leonard, in Madeleine’s opinion, didn’t. He was here only because of his intensity. Had she known from the outset about his manic depression, his messed-up family, his shrink habit, Madeleine would never have allowed herself to get so passionately involved. But now that she was passionately involved, she found little to regret. To feel so much was its own justification.

  “What about Pilgrim Lake Lab?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” Leonard shook his head.

  “Do they know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s not until September,” Madeleine said. “That’s a long time from now.”

  The TV jabbered on its hooks and chains. Leonard sucked his upper lip in the weird new way.

  Madeleine took his hand.

  “I’ll still go with you, if you want,” she said.

  “You will?”

  “You can finish your incompletes in here. We can stay in Providence for the summer and then move out there in September.”

  Leonard was quiet, taking this in.

  Madeleine asked, “Do you think you can handle it? Or would it be better to just rest awhile?”

  “I think I can handle it,” Leonard said. “I want to get back to work.”

  They were silent, looking at each other.

  Leonard leaned closer.

  “‘Once the first avowal has been made,’” he said, quoting Barthes from memory, “‘“I love you” has no meaning whatever.’”

  Madeleine frowned. “Are you going to start that again?”

  “No, but—think about it. That means the first avowal does have meaning.”

  Light came into Madeleine’s eyes. “I’m done then, I guess,” she said.

  “Not me,” Leonard said, holding her hand. “Not me.”

  Pilgrims

  Mitchell and Larry reached Paris in late August after a summer of boredom and desperate employment.

  At Orly, lifting his backpack from the luggage carousel, Mitchell found that his arms were sore from the inoculations he’d gotten in New York two days earlier: cholera in the right, typhus in the left. He’d felt feverish on the flight over. Their low-priority seats were in the last row, across from the malodorous lavatories. Mitchell had dozed fitfully through the long transatlantic night until the cabin lights blazed on and a flight attendant shoved a half-frozen croissant in front of his face, which he nevertheless nibbled as the huge passenger jet made its descent over the capital.

  Among mostly French nationals (tourist season was drawing to a close), they boarded an un-air-conditioned bus and glided noiselessly along smooth highways into the city. Getting off near the Pont de l’Alma, they retrieved their backpacks from the undercarriage and began trudging up the brightening avenue. Larry, who spoke French, walked ahead, looking for Claire’s apartment, while Mitchell, who didn’t have a girlfriend in France or anywhere else, expended no effort in trying to get them where they were going.

  Jet lag added to his slight delirium. It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body. The rising sun forced him to squint. It seemed unkind somehow. And yet, at street level, everything had been arranged to please the eye. The trees were thick with late-summer leaves. They wore iron grilles around their trunks, like aprons. The broadness of the sidewalk accommodated newspaper kiosks, dog walkers, chic ten-year-old girls on their way to the park. A sharp scent of tobacco arose from the curbside, which was the way Mitchell had thought Europe would smell, earthy, sophisticated, and unhealthy, all at once.

  Mitchell hadn’t wanted to start their trip in Paris. Mitchell had wanted to go to London, where he could visit the Globe Theatre, drink Bass ale, and understand what people were saying. But Larry had found two extremely cheap tickets on a charter flight to Orly, and since their money had to last the next nine months, Mitchell didn’t see how he could refuse. He didn’t have anything against Paris, per se. At any other time, he would have jumped at the chance to go to Paris. The problem with Paris, in the present case, was that Larry’s girlfriend was doing a year abroad there and they were going to stay in her apartment.

  This, too, was the cheapest option. Therefore, inarguable.

  As Mitchell fiddled with the belt of his backpack, his fever spiked a half degree.

  “I’m not sure if I’m getting the cholera or the typhus,” he said to Larry.

  “Probably both.”

  Aside from the romantic opportunities, Paris appealed to Larry because he was a Francophile. He’d spent a summer during high school working at a restaurant in Normandy, learning to speak the language and to chop vegetables. At college, his proficiency in French had won him a room in French House. The plays Larry directed at Production Workshop, the student-run theater, were inevitably by French Modernist playwrights. Since coming east to college, Mitchell had been trying to wash the Midwest off himself. Sitting around in Larry’s room, drinking the muddy espresso Larry made and hearing him talk about “the theater of the absurd,” seemed like a good way to start. With his black turtleneck and little white Keds, Larry looked like he’d just returned not from a history lecture but from the Actors Studio. He already had full-blown adult addictions to caffeine and foie gras. Unlike Mitchell’s parents, whose artistic enthusiasms ran to Ethel Merman and Andrew Wyeth, Larry’s parents, Harvey and Moira Pleshette, were devotees of high culture. Moira ran the Wave Hill visual arts program. Harvey served on the boards of the New York City Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. During the Cold War, Irina Kolnoskova, second ballerina of the Kirov Ballet, had stayed in hiding at the Pleshettes’ house, in Riverdale, after defecting. Larry, only fifteen at the time, had ferried champagne splits and graham crackers to th
e ballerina’s bedside, where Kolnoskova alternately wept, watched game shows, or coaxed him to massage her young, spectacularly deformed feet. For Mitchell, Larry’s stories of drunken cast parties held at their house, of stumbling on Leonard Bernstein making out with a male dancer in the upstairs hallway, or of Ben Vereen singing a song from Pippin at Larry’s older sister’s wedding, were as astounding as tales of meeting Joe Montana or Larry Bird would have been for another kind of boy. The Pleshettes’ refrigerator was the first place Mitchell had encountered gourmet ice cream. He still remembered the thrill of it: coming down to the kitchen one morning, the majestic Hudson visible in the window, and opening the freezer to see the small round tub of exotically named ice cream. Not a greedy half gallon, as they had at Mitchell’s house in Michigan, not cheap ice milk, not vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry but a flavor he had never dreamed of before, with a name as lyrical as the Berryman poems he was reading for his American poetry class: rum raisin. Ice cream that was also a drink! In a precious pint-size container. Six of these lined up next to six bags of dark French roast Zabar’s coffee. What was Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me, Mitchell’s face silently pleaded throughout his visits. He was in New York, the greatest city in the world. He wanted to learn everything, and Larry was the guy who could teach him.

  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 sm
all 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.”