Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Mitchell had been reciting the Jesus Prayer for the past two weeks. He did this not only because it was the prayer Franny Glass repeated to herself in Franny and Zooey (though this was certainly a recommendation). Mitchell approved of Franny’s religious desperation, her withdrawal from life, and her disdain for “section men.” He found her book-length nervous breakdown, during which she never once moved from the couch, not only thrillingly dramatic but cathartic in a way Dostoyevsky was supposed to be but wasn’t, for him. (Tolstoy was a different matter.) Still, even though Mitchell was undergoing a similar crisis of meaning, it hadn’t been until he’d come across the Jesus Prayer in a book called The Orthodox Church that he’d decided to give it a try. The Jesus Prayer, it turned out, belonged to the religious tradition into which Mitchell had been obscurely baptized twenty-two years earlier. For this reason he felt entitled to say it. And so he’d been doing just that, while walking around campus, or during Quaker Meeting at the Meeting House near Moses Brown, or at moments like this when the inner tranquillity he’d been struggling to attain began to fray, to falter.
Mitchell liked the chant-like quality of the prayer. Franny said you didn’t even have to think about what you were saying; you just kept repeating the prayer until your heart took over and started repeating it for you. This was important because, whenever Mitchell stopped to think about the words of the Jesus Prayer, he didn’t much like them. “Lord Jesus” was a difficult opener. It had a Bible Belt ring. Likewise, asking for “mercy” felt lowly and serf-like. Having made it through “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” however, Mitchell was confronted with the final stumbling block of “a sinner.” And this was hard indeed. The gospels, which Mitchell didn’t take literally, said you had to die to be born again. The mystics, whom he took as literally as their metaphorical language allowed, said the self had to be subsumed in the Godhead. Mitchell liked the idea of being subsumed in the Godhead. But it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it.
He recited the prayer for another minute, until he felt calmer. Then he got up and went out of the café. Across the street, the side doors of the church were open now. The organist was warming up, the music drifting out over the grass. Mitchell looked down the hill in the direction that Madeleine had disappeared. Seeing no sign of her, he started down Benefit on the way back to his apartment.
Mitchell’s relationship with Madeleine Hanna—his long, aspirational, sporadically promising yet frustrating relationship—had begun at a toga party during freshman orientation. It was the kind of thing he instinctively hated: a keg party based on a Hollywood movie, a capitulation to the mainstream. Mitchell hadn’t come to college to act like John Belushi. He hadn’t even seen Animal House. (He was an Altman fan.) The alternative, however, would have been to sit in his room alone, and so finally, in a spirit of refusal that didn’t include boycotting the party outright, he’d attended in his regular clothes. As soon as he arrived in the basement recreation room, he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d thought that not wearing a toga would make him seem too cool for such jejune festivities, but as he stood in the corner, drinking a plastic cup of foamy beer, Mitchell felt just as much like a misfit as he always did at parties full of popular people.
It was at this point that he noticed Madeleine. She was in the middle of the floor, dancing with a guy whom Mitchell recognized as an RA. Unlike most girls at the party, who looked dumpy in their togas, Madeleine had tied a cord around her waist, fitting her sheet to her body. Her hair was piled on top of her head, Roman-style, and her back was alluringly bare. Other than her exceptional looks, Mitchell noticed that she was an uninspired dancer—she held a beer and talked to the RA, barely paying attention to the beat—and that she kept leaving the party to go down the hall. The third time she was going out, Mitchell, emboldened by alcohol, went up to her and blurted out, “Where do you keep going?”
Madeleine wasn’t startled. She was probably used to strange guys trying to talk to her. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll think I’m weird.”
“No, I won’t,” Mitchell said.
“This is my dorm. I figured since everyone was going to the party, the washers would be free. So I decided to do my laundry at the same time.”
Mitchell took a sip of foam without taking his eyes off her. “Do you need help?”
“No,” Madeleine said, “I can handle it.” As if she thought this sounded mean, she added, “You can come watch, if you want. Laundry’s pretty exciting.”
She started down the cinder-block hallway and he followed at her side.
“Why aren’t you wearing a toga?” she asked him.
“Because it’s dumb!” Mitchell said, nearly shouting. “It’s so stupid!”
This wasn’t the best move, but Madeleine didn’t appear to take it personally. “I just came because I was bored,” she said. “If this wasn’t my dorm, I probably would have bagged.”
In the laundry room, Madeleine began pulling her damp underthings out of a coin-operated washer. For Mitchell, this was titillating enough. But in the next second, something unforgettable occurred. As Madeleine reached into the washer, the knot at her shoulder loosened and the bedsheet fell away.
It was amazing how an image like that—of nothing, really, just a few inches of epidermis—could persist in the mind with undiminished clarity. The moment had lasted no more than three seconds. Mitchell hadn’t been entirely sober at the time. And yet now, almost four years later, he could return to the moment at will (and it was surprising how often he wanted to do this), summoning all of its sensory details, the rumbling of the dryers, the pounding music next door, the linty smell of the dank basement laundry room. He remembered exactly where he’d been standing and how Madeleine had stooped forward, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as the sheet slipped and, for a few exhilarating moments, her pale, quiet, Episcopalian breast exposed itself to his sight.
She quickly covered herself, glancing up and smiling, possibly with embarrassment.
Later on, after their relationship became the intimate, unsatisfying thing it became, Madeleine always disputed Mitchell’s memory of that night. She insisted that she hadn’t worn a toga to the party and that even if she had—and she wasn’t saying that she had—it had never slipped off. Neither on that night, nor on any of the thousand nights since, had he ever seen her naked breast.
Mitchell replied that he’d seen it that once and was very sorry it hadn’t happened again.
In the weeks following the toga party, Mitchell began appearing at Madeleine’s dorm unannounced. After his afternoon Latin class, he walked through the cool leaf-smelling air to Wayland Quad and, his head still throbbing with Vergil’s dactylic hexameter, climbed the stairs to her third-floor room. Standing in Mad
eleine’s doorway or, on luckier days, sitting at her desk, Mitchell did his best to be amusing. Madeleine’s roommate, Jennifer, always gave him a look indicating that she knew exactly why he was there. Fortunately, she and Madeleine didn’t seem to get along, and Jenny often left them alone. Madeleine always seemed happy he’d dropped by. She immediately started telling him about whatever she was reading, while he nodded, as though he could possibly pay attention to her thoughts on Ezra Pound or Ford Madox Ford while standing close enough to smell her shampooed hair. Sometimes Madeleine made him tea. Instead of going for an herbal infusion from Celestial Seasonings, with a quotation from Lao Tzu on the package, Madeleine was a Fortnum & Mason’s drinker, her favorite blend Earl Grey. She didn’t just dump a bag in a cup, either, but brewed loose leaves, using a strainer and a tea cozy. Jennifer had a poster of Vail over her bed, a skier waist-deep in powder. Madeleine’s side of the room was more sophisticated. She’d hung up a set of framed Man Ray photographs. Her bedspread and cashmere sham were the same serious shade of charcoal gray as her V-neck sweaters. On top of her dresser lay exciting womanly objects: a monogrammed silver lipstick, a Filofax containing maps of the New York Subway and the London Underground. But there were also semiembarrassing items: a photograph of her family wearing color-coordinated clothing; a Lilly Pulitzer bathrobe; and a decrepit stuffed bunny named Foo Foo.
Mitchell was prepared, considering Madeleine’s other attributes, to overlook these details.
Sometimes when he stopped by, he found other guys already there. A sandy-haired prepster wearing wingtips without socks, or a large-nosed Milanese in tight pants. On these occasions Jennifer acted even less hospitable. As for Madeleine, she was either so used to male attention that she didn’t notice it anymore, or so guileless that she didn’t suspect why three guys might park themselves in her room like the suitors of Penelope. She didn’t appear to be sleeping with the other guys, as far as Mitchell could tell. This gave him hope.
Little by little, he went from sitting at Madeleine’s desk to sitting on the windowsill near her bed, to lying on the floor in front of her bed while she stretched out above him. Occasionally, the thought that he’d already seen her breast—that he knew exactly what her areola looked like—was enough to give him a hard-on, and he had to turn over on his stomach. Still, on the few times when Madeleine went on anything resembling a date with Mitchell—to a student theater production or poetry reading—there was a tightness around her eyes, as though she was registering the downside, socially and romantically, of being seen with him. She was new at college, too, and finding her way. It was possible she didn’t want to limit her options too soon.
A year went by like this. An entire blue-balled year. Mitchell stopped dropping by Madeleine’s room. Gradually, they drifted into different circles. He didn’t forget about her so much as decide that she was out of his league. Whenever he ran into her, she was so talkative and touched his arm so often that he began to get ideas again, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that anything came close to happening. In November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Mitchell mentioned that he was planning to stay on campus over break rather than fly back to Detroit, and Madeleine surprised him by inviting him to celebrate the holiday with her family in Prettybrook.
They arranged to meet at the Amtrak station, on Wednesday at noon. When Mitchell got there, lugging a prewar suitcase with some dead person’s fading gold initials on it, he found Madeleine waiting for him on the platform, wearing glasses. They were large tortoiseshell frames and, if it was possible, they made him like her even more. The lenses were badly scratched and the left temple was slightly bent. Otherwise, Madeleine was as well put together as always, or even more so, since she was on her way to see her parents.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Mitchell said.
“My contacts were hurting my eyes this morning.”
“I like them.”
“I only wear them sometimes. My eyes aren’t that bad.”
As he stood on the platform, Mitchell wondered if Madeleine’s wearing her glasses indicated that she felt comfortable around him, or if it meant that she didn’t care about looking her best for him. Once they were on the train, amid the crowd of holiday travelers, it was impossible to tell either way. After they found two seats together, Madeleine took her glasses off, holding them in her lap. As the train rolled out of Providence, she put them on again to watch the passing scenery, but quickly snatched them off, shoving them into her bag. (This was the reason her glasses were in the shape they were in; she’d lost the case long ago.)
The trip took five hours. Mitchell wouldn’t have minded if it had taken five days. It was thrilling to have Madeleine captive in the seat beside him. She’d brought volume one of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and, in what appeared to be a guilty traveling habit, a thick copy of Vogue. Mitchell stared out at the warehouses and body shops of Cranston before pulling out his Finnegans Wake.
“You’re not reading that,” Madeleine said.
“I am.”
“No way!”
“It’s about a river,” Mitchell said. “In Ireland.”
The train proceeded along the Rhode Island coast and into Connecticut. Sometimes the ocean appeared, or marshland, then just as suddenly they were passing along the ugly backside of a manufacturing town. In New Haven the train stopped to switch engines before proceeding to Grand Central. After taking the subway to Penn Station, Madeleine led Mitchell down to another set of tracks to catch the train for New Jersey. They arrived at Prettybrook just before eight at night.
The Hannas’ house was a hundred-year-old Tudor, fronted by London plane trees and dying hemlocks. Inside, everything was tasteful and half falling apart. The Oriental carpets had stains. The brick-red kitchen linoleum was thirty years old. When Mitchell used the powder room, he saw that the toilet paper dispenser had been repaired with Scotch tape. So had the peeling wallpaper in the hallway. Mitchell had encountered shabby gentility before, but here was Wasp thrift in its purest form. The plaster ceilings sagged alarmingly. Vestigial burglar alarms sprouted from the walls. The knob-and-tube wiring sent flames out of the lighting sockets when you unplugged anything.
Mitchell was good with parents. Parents were his specialty. Within an hour of arriving Wednesday night, he had established himself as a favorite. He knew the lyrics to the Cole Porter songs Alton played on the “hi-fi.” He allowed Alton to read excerpts from Kingsley Amis’s On Drink aloud, and seemed to find them just as hilarious as Alton did. At dinner, Mitchell talked about Sandra Day O’Connor with Phyllida and about Abscam with Alton. To top it off, Mitchell put in a dazzling performance later that night at Scrabble.
“I didn’t know groszy was a word,” Phyllida said, greatly impressed.
“It’s Polish currency. A hundred groszy are worth one zloty.”
“Are all your new friends at college this worldly, Maddy?” Alton said.
When Mitchell glanced at Madeleine, she was smiling at him. And that was when it had happened. Madeleine was wearing a bathrobe. She had her glasses on. She was looking both homey and sexy, completely out of his league and, at the same time, within reach, by virtue of how well he seemed to fit into her family already, and what a perfect son-in-law he would make. For all of these reasons Mitchell suddenly thought, “I’m going to marry this girl!” The knowledge went through him like electricity, a feeling of destiny.
“Foreign words are disallowed,” Madeleine said.
He spent Thanksgiving morning moving chairs for Phyllida, and drinking Bloody Marys and playing pool with Alton. The billiard table had braided leather pockets instead of a ball return. Lining up a shot, Alton said, “A few years ago, I noticed this table wasn’t level. The man the company sent out said it was warped, probably from one of the kids’ friends sitting on it. He wanted me to buy a whole new base. But I put a piece of wood under one leg. Problem solved.”
Soon company arrived. A mellow-voiced cousin named Doats, wearing ta
rtan pants, his wife, Dinky, a frosted blonde with late–de Kooning teeth, and their young children and fat setter, Nap.
Madeleine got down on her knees to greet Nap, ruffling his fur and hugging him.
“Nap’s gotten so fat,” she said.
“You know what I think it is?” Doats said. “It’s because he’s fixed. Nap’s a eunuch. And eunuchs were always famously plump, weren’t they?”
Madeleine’s sister, Alwyn, and her husband, Blake Higgins, showed up around one. Alton fixed the cocktails while Mitchell made himself helpful by building a fire.
Thanksgiving dinner proceeded in a blur of wine refills and jesting toasts. After dinner, everyone repaired to the library, where Alton began serving port. The fire was dying, and Mitchell stepped outside to get more wood. By this time he was feeling no pain. He stared up at the starry night sky, through the branches of the white pines. He was in the middle of New Jersey but it might have been the Black Forest. Mitchell loved the house. He loved the whole big, genteel, boozy Hanna operation. Returning with firewood, he heard music playing. Madeleine was at the piano, while Alton sang along. The selection was something called “Til,” a family favorite. Alton’s voice was surprisingly good; he’d been in an a capella singing group at Yale. Madeleine was a little slow with the chord changes, plunking them out. Her glasses slid down her nose as she read the sheet music. She’d kicked off her shoes to press the pedals with bare feet.
Mitchell stayed through the weekend. On his last night in Prettybrook, as he was lying in his attic guest room, reading, he heard the hallway door open and feet begin climbing the stairs. Madeleine knocked softly on his door and came in.
The Marriage Plot Page 9
