The Marriage Plot (58 page)

She reached out and put her hands around his neck. She’d been so happy only a little while ago, feeling that their life was finally turning around. But now it all seemed like a cruel joke, the apartment, Columbia, everything. They stood at the subway entrance, one of those hugging, crying couples in New York, ignored by everyone passing by, granted perfect privacy in the middle of a teeming city on a hot summer night. Madeleine said nothing because she didn’t know what to say. Even “I love you” seemed inadequate. She’d said this to Leonard so many times in situations like this that she was worried it was losing its power.

But she should have said it, anyway. She should have kept her arms around Leonard’s neck and refused to let go, because, as soon as she stopped hugging him, with swift decisiveness, Leonard turned and fled down the steps of the subway. At first Madeleine was too surprised to react. But then she ran after him. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she didn’t see him. She ran past the token booth toward the other exit. She thought Leonard had climbed back up to the street, until she caught sight of him on the other side of the turnstiles, walking toward the tracks. As she dug into her pocketbook for change to buy a token, she felt the rumble of an approaching train. Wind was moving through the subway tunnel, kicking up pieces of litter. Realizing that Leonard must have jumped the turnstile, Madeleine decided to follow. She ran and leapt over the barrier. Two nearby teenagers laughed, seeing her do this, an Upper-East-Side-looking woman, in a dress. The train’s lights appeared in the tunnel. Leonard had reached the edge of the platform. The train was roaring into the station and Madeleine, running, could see that she was too late.

And then the train slowed and stopped. Leonard was still there, waiting for it.

Madeleine reached him. She called his name.

Leonard turned and looked at her, his eyes vacant. He reached out and placed his hands tenderly on her shoulders. In a soft voice edged with pity, with sadness, Leonard said, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.”

And then he pushed her back, not gently, and jumped onto the train before the doors closed. He didn’t turn back to look at her through the window. The train began to move, at first slowly enough that it seemed Madeleine might be able to stop it with her hand—stop everything, what Leonard had just said, his shoving her, and her lack of resistance, her collaboration—but soon accelerating beyond her power to arrest it or to lie to herself; and now all the litter on the platform was swirling and the train wheels were screeching and the lights inside the car were blinking on and off, like the lights on a broken chandelier, or the cells in a dying brain, as the train disappeared into the darkness.

The Bachelorette’s Survival Kit

T
here were a lot of things to admire about the Quakers. They had no clerical hierarchy. They recited no creed, tolerated no sermons. They’d established equality between the sexes in their Meetings as early as the 1600s. Just about every American social movement you could think of had been supported and often spearheaded by the Quakers, from abolition, to women’s rights, to temperance (O.K., one mistake), to civil rights, to environmentalism. The Society of Friends met in simple spaces. They sat in silence, waiting for the Light. They were in America but not of America. They refused to fight America’s wars. When the U.S. government had interned Japanese citizens during World War II, the Quakers had strongly opposed the move, and had come out to wave goodbye as the Japanese families were boarded onto trains. The Quakers had a saying: “Truth from any source.” They were ecumenical and nonjudgmental, allowing agnostics and even atheists to attend their Yearly Meetings. It was this spirit of inclusiveness, no doubt, that led the small group of worshippers at the Friends Meeting House, in Prettybrook, to make room for Mitchell when he began to appear on hot July summer mornings.

The Meeting House stood at the end of a gravel road just beyond the Prettybrook Battlefield. A simple structure of hand-laid stones, with a white wooden porch and a single chimney, the building hadn’t changed from the date of its construction—1753, according to the plaque—save for the addition of electric lights and a heating system. The bulletin board outside bore a flyer for an antinuke march, a plea to petition the government on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of murder the previous year, and assorted pamphlets on Quakerism. The oak-paneled interior was filled with wooden benches set in opposing sections, so that worshippers faced one another. Light issued from masked dormers above a beautifully carpentered, curved ceiling of gray wooden slats.

Mitchell liked to sit in the rear set of benches, behind a pillar. He felt less conspicuous there. Depending on the Meeting (there were two First Day Meetings, one at seven a.m., the other at eleven), anywhere from a handful to three dozen Friends took their seats in the cozy, cabin-like room. Most of the time the only sound was the distant hum of Route 1. An entire hour might pass without anyone saying a word. On other days, responding to inner promptings, people spoke up. One morning Clyde Pettengill, who used a cane, stood up to lament the recent accident at the Embalse nuclear plant in Argentina, where there had been a
total loss of coolant
. His wife, Mildred, felt compelled to speak next. Not getting up as her husband had, but remaining seated with her eyes closed, she spoke in a clear voice, her pretty old-woman’s face lifted in smiling remembrance. “Maybe because it’s summer—I don’t know—but I’m put in mind today of going to Meetings when I was a little girl. Summer always seemed like the hardest time to sit still and be quiet. So my grandmother developed a strategy. Before the Meeting began, she used to take a piece of butterscotch candy out of her purse. She’d make sure I saw it. But she wouldn’t give it to me. She’d hold it in her hand. And if I was good, and behaved like a proper young lady, my grandmother would give me the candy after forty-five minutes or so. Now I’m eighty-two, almost eighty-three, and do you know what? I feel exactly the same as I did then. I’m still waiting for that piece of butterscotch candy to be placed in my hand. It’s not candy that I’m waiting for anymore. It’s just a sunny summer day like this, with the sun like a great big butterscotch candy in the sky. I see I’m waxing poetic now. That means I had better stop.”

As for Mitchell, he didn’t say anything at the Meetings. The Spirit didn’t move him to speak. He sat on the bench, enjoying the stillness of the morning and the musty scent of the Meeting House. But he didn’t feel entitled to illumination.

The shame he felt for running away from Kalighat hadn’t gone away, even with the passage of six months. After leaving Calcutta, Mitchell had traveled around the country with no fixed plan, like a fugitive. In Benares, he’d stayed at the Yogi Lodge, going down to the funeral ghats every morning to see bodies being cremated. He hired a boatman to take him out on the Ganges. After five days, he took the train back to Calcutta, heading south. He went to Madras, to the former French outpost of Pondicherry (home to Sri Aurobindo), and to Madurai. He stayed a single night in Trivandrum, at the southern end of the Malabar Coast, and then began traveling up the western shore. In Kerala the literacy rate soared and Mitchell ate his meals off jungle leaves instead of plates. He kept in touch with Larry, writing him at AmEx in Athens, and, in mid-February, they were reunited in Goa.

Instead of flying to Calcutta, as his ticket originally stipulated, Larry changed his stop to Bombay, and traveled down to Goa by bus. They had arranged to meet at the bus station at noon, but Larry’s bus was late. Mitchell came and went three times, scanning the passengers disembarking from different multicolored buses before Larry finally climbed off of one around four in the afternoon. Mitchell was so happy to see him that he couldn’t stop smiling and patting Larry on the back.

“My man!” he said. “You made it!”

“What happened, Mitchell?” Larry said. “Get your head caught in a lawn mower?”

For the next week they rented a hut on the beach. It had a tropical-seeming thatch roof and a disagreeably utilitarian concrete floor. The other huts were full of Europeans, most of whom went around without clothes. On the terraced hillside, Goan men clustered amid the palm trees to ogle the immodest Western women below. As for Mitchell, he felt too translucently white to expose himself, and stayed in the shade, but Larry braved sunburn, spending a good portion of each day on the beach with his silk scarf wrapped around his head.

During the serene, zephyr-filled days and coolish nights, they shared stories about their time apart. Larry was impressed by Mitchell’s experience at Kalighat. He didn’t seem to think that three weeks of volunteering were of no consequence.

“I think it’s great you did it,” he said. “You worked for Mother Teresa! Not that I would want to do something like that. But for you, Mitchell, that’s right up your alley.”

Things with Iannis hadn’t turned out so well. Almost immediately, he’d begun asking Larry how much money his family had. On learning that Larry’s father was a lawyer, Iannis asked if he could help him get a green card. He acted possessive or distant, depending on the circumstances. If they went to a gay bar, Iannis became insanely jealous if Larry so much as looked at another guy. The rest of the time he wouldn’t let Larry touch him for fear people would learn their secret. He started calling Larry a “faggot,” acting as if he, Iannis, were straight and only experimenting. This got tiresome, as did hanging around Athens for days on end while Iannis went back home to the Peloponnese. And so finally Larry had gone to the travel agent and rebooked his ticket.

It was comforting to learn that homosexual relationships were just as screwed up as straight ones, but Mitchell made no comment. Over the next three months, as they traveled over the subcontinent, Iannis wasn’t mentioned again. They visited Mysore, Cochin, Mahabalipuram, staying no more than a night or two in any place, heading back north, reaching Agra in March and making their way to Varanasi (they sometimes used Hindi names now) and back to Calcutta to meet Professor Hughes and begin their job as research assistants. With Hughes they ended up in remote villages without plumbing. They defecated side by side, squatting in open fields. They had adventures, saw holy men walk across hot coals, filmed interviews with great choreographers of masked Indian dance, and met an actual maharaja, who had a palace but no money and used a tattered “brolly” as a parasol. By April, the weather was turning hot. The monsoons were still months away, but Mitchell could already feel the climate growing inhospitable. By the end of May, oppressed by increasing temperatures and feelings of aimlessness, he decided that it was time to go home. Larry wanted to see Nepal, and stayed on a few more weeks.

From Calcutta, Mitchell flew back to Paris, staying a few days in a decent hotel and availing himself of his credit card for the last time. (He wouldn’t be able to justify it once he returned to the States.) Just as he was adjusting to the European time zone, he took a charter flight back to JFK. And so he was alone, in New York, when he learned that Madeleine had married Leonard Bankhead.

Mitchell’s strategy of waiting out the recession hadn’t worked. The unemployment rate was 10.1 percent the month he returned. From the window of his shuttle bus into Manhattan, Mitchell saw shuttered businesses, their windows soaped over. There were more people living on the street, plus a new term for them: the homeless. His own money pouch contained only $270 worth of traveler’s checks and a twenty-rupee note he’d kept as a souvenir. Not wanting to shell out for a hotel in New York, he’d called Dan Schneider from Grand Central, asking if he could crash at his place for a few days, and Schneider said yes.

Mitchell took the shuttle to Times Square, then hopped on the 1 train to Seventy-ninth Street. Schneider buzzed him in and was waiting in his doorway when Mitchell reached his floor. They hugged briefly, and Schneider said, “Whoa, Grammaticus. You’re a little ripe.”

Mitchell averred that he’d stopped using deodorant in India.

“Yeah, well, this is America,” Schneider said. “And it’s
summertime
. Get yourself some Old Spice, man.”

Schneider dressed all in black to match his beard and cowboy boots. His apartment was fussily nice, with built-in bookcases and a collection of iridescent ceramics made by an artist he “collected.” He had a decent job grant-writing at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and was happy to buy Mitchell drinks at Dublin House, the bar close to his building. Over pints of Guinness, Schneider filled Mitchell in on all the Brown-related gossip he’d missed while in India. Lollie Ames had moved to Rome and was dating a forty-year-old. Tony Perotti, the campus anarchist, had wimped out and gone to law school. Thurston Meems had made a tape of his own faux-naïf music on which he accompanied himself on a Casio. All this was fairly amusing until Schneider suddenly said, “Oh, shit! I forgot. Your girl Madeleine got married! Sorry, man.”

Mitchell made no reaction. The news was so devastating that the only way he could survive it was to pretend that he wasn’t surprised. “I knew that was going to happen,” he said.

“Yeah, well, Bankhead’s lucky. She’s sexy. I don’t know what she sees in that guy, though. He’s like Lurch.” Schneider went on complaining about Bankhead, and guys like Bankhead, tall guys with lots of hair, while Mitchell sucked bitter-tasting foam off the top of his stout.

This simulated numbness got him through the next few minutes. And since it worked so well, Mitchell kept it going the next day, until the wages of all this unprocessed emotion woke him up, the next night, at four a.m. with the force of a stab wound. He lay on Schneider’s shabby-chic couch, his eyes wide open. Three different car alarms were going off, each seemingly centered in his chest.

The following days were among the most painful in Mitchell’s life. He wandered the baking streets, sweating, fighting off a childish urge to bawl. He felt like a great big boot had come down from the sky and ground him under its heel like the cigarette butts on the pavement. He kept thinking, “I lost. I’m dead. He killed me.” It felt almost pleasurable to denigrate himself in this fashion, and so he kept it up. “I’m just a piece of shit. I never had a chance. It’s laughable. Look at me. Just look. Ugly baldheaded crazy religious stupid PIECE OF SHIT!”