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.
Larry treated Mitchell’s interest in Christian mysticism the same way. He noticed. He made it clear he noticed. But he made no comment, for the time being.
Besides, Larry was undergoing his own transformations on the road. He bought a purple silk scarf. His smoking, which Mitchell had thought a temporary affectation, became habitual. At first Larry bought cigarettes singly, which apparently you could do, but soon he was buying whole packs of Gauloises Bleues. Strangers began bumming cigarettes off him, skinny, Gypsy-looking dudes who put their arms around Larry’s shoulder, Euro-style. Mitchell felt like Larry’s chaperone, waiting for these confabs to end.
In addition, Larry didn’t appear to be sufficiently heartbroken. There was a moment, on the ferry to Rosslare, when he’d gone on deck to smoke a moody cigarette. It was understood that he was thinking about Claire. But he tossed the cigarette overboard, the smoke drifted away, and that was that.
From Ireland they returned to Paris, and took an overnight sleeper to Barcelona. The weather felt almost balmy. Along the Ramblas, jungle wildlife was for sale, wise-looking macaques, Technicolor parrots. Heading farther south, they stayed a night each in Jerez and Ronda, before moving on for three days in Sevilla. Then, realizing how close they were to North Africa, they decided to continue south to Algeciras and ride the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. They spent their first days in Morocco failing to buy hash. Their guidebook listed the location of a bar in Tétouan where hash could be easily scored but included a warning, at the bottom of the same page, comparing Moroccan prisons to the Turkish jail in Midnight Express. Finally, in the small mountain village of Chaouen, they came into their hotel to find two Danes sitting in the lobby, with a softball-size chunk of hash on the table in front of them. Mitchell and Larry spent the next days gloriously stoned. They wandered the narrow beehive streets, listening to the muezzins’ emotional cries, and drank bright green glasses of mint tea in the town square. Chaouen was painted light blue to blend in with the sky. Even the flies couldn’t find it.
It was in Morocco that they realized their backpacks were a mistake. The coolest guys they met weren’t the expeditionists with their camping gear. The coolest guys were the travelers who’d just returned from Ladakh carrying nothing more than a tote. Backpacks were unwieldy. They marked you as a tourist. Even if you weren’t an overweight waddling American, with a backpack on you were. Mitchell got stuck entering train compartments and had to wave his arms frantically to wriggle free. Getting rid of their backpacks was impossible, however, because, as they returned to Europe in October, the weather was already turning cooler. Leaving the warmth of southern France, they headed up into autumnal Lausanne, breezy Lucerne. They took out their sweaters.
In Switzerland Mitchell hit on the idea of using his MasterCard to buy things that would alarm his parents when they received the statements. Over three weeks he made charges of: 65 Swiss francs ($29.57) for a Tyrolean pipe and tobacco from Totentanz: Cigarren und Pfeifen; 72 Swiss francs ($32.75) for a meal in a Zurich restaurant called Das Bordell; 234 Austrian schillings ($13) for an English edition of Charles Colson’s memoir Born Again; and 62,500 lire ($43.54) for a subscription to a Communist magazine, published in Bologna, to be shipped once a month to the Grammaticus home address in Detroit.
They reached Venice on a cloud-cushioned afternoon in late October. Unable to afford a gondola, they spent their first hours in the city traversing bridges and flights of stairs that all seemed to lead, as in an Escher drawing, back to the same piazza, with the same burbling fountain and duo of old men. After finding a cheap pensione, they went out to visit the Piazza San Marco. In the dimly lit museum in the Doge’s Palace, Mitchell found himself staring at a mysterious object in a vitrine. Made of badly corroded metal links, the object consisted of a circular belt from which another belt hung down. The label read: cintura di castita.
“That chastity belt was the
most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Mitchell said later, over dinner at a budget restaurant.
“That’s why they call them the Dark Ages,” Larry said.
“That was beyond dark.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “There were two openings. One in front for the vagina, and one in back for the asshole. With serrated metal teeth. If you took a shit with one of those things on, your shit would be extruded like cake frosting.”
“Thanks for the image,” Larry said.
“Imagine having one of those things on for months and months. For years! How would you keep it clean?”
“You’d be the queen,” Larry said. “You’d have someone to clean it for you.”
“A lady-in-waiting.”
“Just one of the perks.”
They refilled their wineglasses. Larry was in a good mood. The speed with which he’d gotten over Claire was stunning. Maybe he hadn’t really liked Claire all that much. Maybe he disliked Claire as much as Mitchell did. The fact that Larry could get over Claire in a matter of weeks, whereas Mitchell remained heartbroken over Madeleine—even though he hadn’t gone out with Madeleine—meant one of two things: either Mitchell’s love for Madeleine was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken, and the “emotion” he felt for Madeleine—somewhat increased by the flowing chianti—was only a perverted form of self-love. Not love at all, in other words.
“Don’t you miss Claire?” Mitchell asked.
“I do.”
“You don’t seem like you do.”
Larry took this in, staring back into Mitchell’s eyes, but saying nothing.
“What was she like in bed?”
“Now, now, Mitchell,” Larry lightly scolded.
“Come on. What was she like?”
“She was wild, Mitchell. Unbelievably wild.”
“Tell me.”
Larry took a sip of wine, considering. “She was dutiful. She was the kind of girl who says, ‘O.K. Lie on your back.’”
“And then she’d blow you?”
“Um, yeah.”
“‘Lie on your back.’ Like at the doctor’s.”
Larry nodded.
“That sounds pretty decent.”
“It wasn’t that great.”
This was more than Mitchell could bear. “What do you mean!” he cried. “What are you complaining about?”
“I wasn’t that into it.”
Mitchell leaned away from the table, as if to distance himself from such heresy. He drained off his glass of wine and ordered another.
“That’s over our budget,” Larry cautioned.
“I don’t care.”
Larry ordered more wine too.
They drank wine until the proprietor of the restaurant told them he was closing. Staggering back to their hotel, they fell into the big double bed. At one point, in his sleep, Larry rolled on top of Mitchell, or Mitchell dreamed this. He had an erection. He thought he might throw up. Somebody in his dream was sucking his cock, or Larry was, and then he woke up to hear Larry say, “Ugh, you stink,” without pushing him away, however. And then Mitchell passed out again, and in the morning they both acted as if nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had.
By late November, they reached Greece. From Brindisi they had taken a ferry smelling of diesel fuel to Piraeus, and found a room in a hotel not far from Syntagma Square. Gazing from the balcony of this hotel, Mitchell had a revelation. Greece wasn’t part of Europe. It was the Middle East. Flat-roofed gray high-rises like the one he was in extended all the way to the hazy horizon. Steel girders protruded from the roofs and exteriors, making the buildings look barbed, bristling against the acrid atmosphere. He might have been in Beirut. The thick smog was mixed with tear gas on a daily basis as police battled protesters down in the streets. Protest marches occurred constantly, against the government, against CIA interference, against capitalism, against NATO, and in support of the return of the Elgin marbles. Greece, the birthplace of democracy, stymied by free speech. In coffeehouses everyone had an informed opinion, and no one could get anything done.
A few old widows, clad head to toe in black, reminded Mitchell of his grandmother. He recognized the sweets and the pastries, the sound of the language. But most of the people looked foreign to him. The men, on the whole, were a head shorter than he was. Mitchell felt like a Swede, looming over them. Here and there he saw a facial resemblance, but that was as far as it went. Among the anarchists and yellow-toothed poets in the bar across from his hotel, or the gorilla-necked cabdrivers who drove him around, or the entitled Orthodox priests he saw on the streets and in the smoky chapels, Mitchell had never felt more American in his life.
Everywhere they ate, the food was lukewarm. Moussaka and pastitsio, lamb and rice, fried potatoes, okra in tomato sauce—all were kept a few degrees above room temperature in trays in open kitchens. Larry began ordering grilled fish, but Mitchell, loyal to memory, continued to eat the dishes his grandmother had made for him as a boy. He kept expecting to get a nice hot plate of moussaka, but after his fourth slice in three days he realized that Greeks liked their food lukewarm. Simultaneous with this realization, as if his previous ignorance had protected him, came his first stomach troubles. He fled back to his hotel room and spent the next three hours on an oddly low toilet, staring at that day’s edition of I Kathimerini. The photographs showed Prime Minister Papandreou, a riot at Athens University, police firing tear gas, and an unbelievably wrinkled woman whom the photo caption identified, impossibly, as Melina Mercouri.
The Greek alphabet was the final defeat to him. At twelve he used to sit at his yia yia’s feet, her golden boy, learning the Greek alphabet. But he’d never gotten past sigma and now he’d forgotten everything except and .
After three days in Athens, they decided to set out for the Peloponnese by bus. Before leaving, they stopped at the American Express office to cash traveler’s checks. First, however, Mitchell inquired at the General Services window for any mail being held for them. The woman handed Mitchell two envelopes. He recognized the flowery cursive on the first envelope as his mother’s. But it was the second envelope that made his heart jump. On the front, his name and the “c/o American Express” address had been typed on a manual typewriter in need of a new ribbon. The as and s in his surname were nearly inkless. Turning it over, he read the return address: M. Hanna, Pilgrim Lake Laboratory, Starbuck #12, Provincetown, MA 02657.
Quickly, as though the envelope contained profanity, Mitchell stuffed the letter into the back pocket of his jeans. In the line for the tellers’ windows, he opened the letter from Lillian instead.
Dear Mitchell,
Ever since we got the condo in Vero Beach, your father and I have been “snowbirds,” but this year we can really claim the title. On Tuesday we flew “Herbie” all the way from Detroit down to Fort Myers. It was pretty fancy, flying in your own private plane, and the whole trip only took six hours. (I remember when it used to take us twenty-four hours by car!) I enjoyed watching the country pass by far, far below. You don’t fly as high as in a real airliner, so you can really see the terrain, all the rivers meandering this way and that and, of course, the farmland, which reminded me of one of Grammy’s old patchwork quilts. I can’t say the trip was very conducive to conversation, though. You can hardly hear a thing over the engine and your father had his headphones on most of the time, in order to listen to the “traffic,” so I had no one to talk to except Kerbi, who was in my lap. (I just now noticed that “Herbie” and “Kerbi” rhyme.)
Your father pointed out the sights to me along the way. We flew right over Atlanta, and over some big swamps, which made me a little anxious. If you had to land there, there would be nothing for miles and miles but snakes and alligators.
As you can tell from all this, your mother wasn’t exactly a model “co-pilot.” Dean kept telling me to stop worrying and that he had everything “under control.” But the plane ride was so bumpy it was
impossible for me to read my book. All I could do was stare out the window, and after a while even the good ol’ USA didn’t look all that interesting. But we got here in one piece, at least, and now we’re in Vero, where the weather is, as usual, too hot. Winston is coming up from Miami on Christmas Day (he’s got some kind of recording session on Christmas Eve, he says, and can’t make it until then). Nick and Sally are flying in with little Nick tomorrow night. Dean and I are planning to pick them up at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport and take them to a real nice place we found in Fort Pierce, just off A1A, on the water.
It’s going to feel strange not to have our “baby” with us at Christmas this year. Your father and I are thrilled that you and Larry have this chance to “see the world.” After all the hard work you did at college, you deserve it. I think of you every day and try to imagine where you might be and what you might be doing. Usually I know where you’re living and sleeping. Even at college we usually knew what your apartment looked like, so it wasn’t so hard for me to picture you in my mind’s eye. But now I don’t know where you are most of the time, and so am grateful for any postcard you send. We got your postcard from Venice with the arrow pointing to “our hotel.” I couldn’t quite make out the hotel itself, but I’m glad it’s “dirt cheap,” as you said in your note. Venice looks like a magical place, a perfect locale for a young “literary man” to get inspiration.
The Marriage Plot Page 25