The Marriage Plot (61 page)
The birds woke him early, and he realized it was First Day. Dressing quickly, kissing Madeleine on the cheek, he set off for the Friends Meeting House. The way led through the Hannas’ neighborhood of large, older houses, through the hopelessly quaint town of Prettybrook itself, with its town square and statue of Washington crossing the Delaware (some fifteen miles distant), and on through a series of leafy streets and alongside a golf course until the town ended and the battlefield began. The scenery rolled past Mitchell as though he were watching it on a screen. He was too happy to be involved in it, and though he was walking, he felt as if he were standing still. He kept bringing his hands to his nose to inhale Madeleine’s smell. That, too, was fainter than desirable. Mitchell knew that their lovemaking hadn’t been perfect the previous night, or really much good at all, but they had all the time they needed now to get it right.
Therefore, in his first act of fidelity, Mitchell stopped at the drugstore in town and bought a Mennen Speed Stick. He carried the deodorant in a paper bag all the way to the Meeting House, and kept it in his lap after he took a seat.
The day was going to be hot. For this reason, there were more people at the seven a.m. meeting than usual to take advantage of the cooler temperature. Most Friends had already withdrawn into themselves, but Joe and June Yamamoto, who had their eyes open, nodded in greeting.
Mitchell sat down, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind. But this was impossible. For the first fifteen minutes, all he thought about was Madeleine. He remembered what she’d felt like in his arms, and the noises she’d made. He wondered if Madeleine would ask him to move in with her on Riverside Drive. Or would it be better for him to get a place of his own, nearby, and take it slowly? No matter what, he had to go back to Detroit to see his parents. But he didn’t have to stay there long. He could come back to New York, and find a job, and see what happened.
Whenever he caught himself thinking these things, he gently turned his attention away.
For a while, he went deep. He breathed in and out, and listened, among the other listening bodies. But something was different today. The deeper Mitchell went inside himself, the more troubled he was. Instead of his previous happiness, he felt a creeping unease, as if the floor were about to give way beneath him. He couldn’t testify that what he then experienced was an Indwelling of the Light. Though the Quakers believed that Christ revealed himself to every person, without intermediaries, and that each person was able to take part in a continuing revelation, the things Mitchell saw weren’t revelations of a universal significance. A still, small voice was speaking to him, but it was saying things he didn’t want to hear. Suddenly, as if he was truly in touch with his Deep Self and could view his situation objectively, Mitchell understood why making love with Madeleine had felt as strangely empty as it had. It was because Madeleine hadn’t been coming to him; she’d only been leaving Bankhead. After opposing her parents all summer, Madeleine was giving in to the necessity of an annulment. In order to make that clear to herself, she’d come up to Mitchell’s bedroom in the attic.
He was her survival kit.
The truth poured into him like light, and if any of the Friends nearby noticed Mitchell wiping his eyes, they gave no sign.
He cried for the last ten minutes, as quietly as he could. At some point, the voice also told Mitchell that, in addition to never living with Madeleine, he would never go to divinity school, either. It was unclear what he was going to do with his life, but he wasn’t going to be a monk, or a minister, or even a scholar. The voice was urging him to write Professor Richter to tell him so.
But that was all the understanding the Light brought him, because a minute later Clyde Pettengill shook hands with his wife, Mildred, and then everyone in the Meeting House was shaking hands.
Outside, Claire Ruth had set up muffins and coffee on the picnic table, but Mitchell didn’t stay for conversation. He headed along the path, past the Quaker cemetery, where the markers bore no names.
A half hour later, he entered the front door on Wilson Lane. He heard Madeleine moving around in her bedroom, and climbed the stairs.
As he entered her room, Madeleine glanced away, long enough for Mitchell to confirm his intuition.
He didn’t let things get any more awkward than they already were, and spoke quickly.
“You know that letter I sent you? From India?”
“That I didn’t get?”
“That’s the one. My memory of it’s a little sketchy, for the reasons I mentioned. But there was one part, at the end, where I said I was going to tell you something, ask you something, but I had to do it in person.”
Madeleine waited.
“It’s a literary question.”
“O.K.”
“From the books you read for your thesis, and for your article—the Austen and the James and everything—was there any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who’s always been in love with her, and then
they
get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she’s got more important things to do with her life? And so finally the guy doesn’t propose at all, even though he still loves her? Is there any book that ends like that?”
“No,” Madeleine said. “I don’t think there’s one like that.”
“But do you think that would be good? As an ending?”
He looked at Madeleine. She wasn’t so special, maybe. She was his ideal, but an early conception of it, and he would get over it in time. Mitchell gave her a slightly goofy smile. He was feeling a lot better about himself, as if he might do some good in the world.
Madeleine sat down on a packing box. Her face looked more drawn than usual, and older. She narrowed her eyes, as if trying to bring him into focus.
A moving van rolled down the street, shaking the house, the arthritic Great Dane next door bellowing hoarsely after it.
And Madeleine kept squinting, as though Mitchell was already far away, until finally, smiling gratefully, she answered, “Yes.”
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Virgin Suicides
Middlesex
My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead
(editor)
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 8JB
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The right of Jeffrey Eugenides to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Excerpts from
The Marriage Plot
originally appeared, in slightly different form, in
The New Yorker
.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to publish lyrics from ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Jarrison, Tina Weymouth, and Brian Eno. Copyright © 1981 Index Music, Inc., Bleu-Disque Music Co., and E.G. Music Ltd. All rights on behalf of Index Music, Inc., Bleu-Disque co., Inc. administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Brothers Publications, U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014.
The author would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in providing and verifying factual material used in
The Marriage Plot
: Dr. Richard A. Friedman, director of psychopharmacology at the Payne Whitney Manhattan psychiatric clinic and professor of clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College; Professor David Botstein, director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University; and Georgia Eugenides, local
Madeline
expert. In addition, the author would like to cite the following article, from which he drew information on yeast genetics: “The Mother-Daughter Mating Type Switching Asymmetry of Budding Yeast Is Not Conferred by the Segregation of Parental HO Gene DNA Strands,” by Amar J. S. Klar.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
THE MARRIAGE PLOT
. Copyright © Jeffrey Eugenides 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-744127-3
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