The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Watch out, Claire,” Larry said. “Mitchell was a religious studies major.”

  Claire grimaced and said, “Oh, my God.”

  “I’ll tell you what I learned in religious studies,” Mitchell said with a slight smile. “If you read any of the mystics, or any decent theology—Catholic, Protestant, kabbalistic—the one thing they all agree on is that God is beyond any human concept or category. That’s why Moses can’t look at Yahweh. That’s why, in Judaism, you can’t even spell out God’s name. The human mind can’t conceive what God is. God doesn’t have a sex or anything else.”

  “Then why is he a man with a long white beard on the Sistine Chapel?”

  “Because that’s what the masses like.”

  “The masses?”

  “Some people need a picture. Any great religion has to be inclusive. And to be inclusive you have to accommodate different levels of sophistication.”

  “You sound just like my father. Whenever I tell him how sexist Judaism is, he tells me it’s tradition. Because it’s tradition, that means it’s good. You have to live with it.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that for some people, tradition is good. For others, it’s not so important. Some people think that God reveals Himself through history, others that revelation is progressive, that maybe the rules or interpretation changes over time.”

  “The whole idea of revelation is teleological and bogus.”

  Back in Scarsdale, facing down her father in their Chagall-lined living room, Claire had no doubt stood just as she was standing now: feet planted apart, hands on hips, torso leaning slightly forward. Despite being irritated by her, Mitchell was also impressed—as Mr. Schwartz must also have been impressed during their arguments—with the force of Claire’s will.

  He realized she was waiting for him to respond and so he said, “Bogus how?”

  “The whole idea of God’s revealing ‘Himself’ through history is silly. The Jews build the temple. Then the temple gets destroyed. So the Jews have to build it again so that the Messiah shows up? The idea that God is waiting around for stuff to happen—like, if there was such a thing as God, he would even care what people are doing—is totally anthropocentric and so totally, totally male! Before the patriarchal religions were created, people worshipped the Goddess. The Babylonians did, the Etruscans did. The religion of the Goddess was organic and environmental—it was about the cycle of nature—as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, which are just about imposing the law and raping the land.”

  Mitchell glanced at Larry to see that he was nodding in agreement. Mitchell might have nodded, too, if he were going out with Claire, but Larry looked sincerely interested in the Goddess of the Babylonians.

  “If you dislike a conception of God as masculine,” Mitchell said to Claire, “why replace it with one that’s feminine? Why not get rid of the whole idea of a gendered divinity?”

  “Because it is gendered. It is. Already. Do you know what a mikva is?” She turned to Larry. “Does he know what a mikva is?”

  “I know what a mikva is,” Mitchell said.

  “O.K., so my mom goes to a mikva every month after her period, right? To cleanse herself. To cleanse herself from what? From the power to give birth? To create life? They turn the greatest power a woman has into something they should be ashamed about.”

  “I agree with you, that’s absurd.”

  “But it’s not about the mikva. The whole institutionalized form of Western religion is all about telling women they’re inferior, unclean, and subordinate to men. And if you actually believe in any of that stuff, I don’t know what to say.”

  “You’re not having your period right now, are you?” Mitchell said.

  Claire’s expressive face went blank. “I can’t believe you just said that,” she said.

  “I was just kidding,” Mitchell said. His face was suddenly hot.

  “What a total sexist thing to say.”

  “I was kidding,” he repeated, his voice tight.

  “You have to get to know Mitchell,” Larry said. “He’s an acquired taste.”

  “I’m in agreement with you!” Mitchell tried again with Claire, but the more he protested, the more insincere he sounded, and finally he shut up.

  There was one bright side to the day: since it still felt like the middle of the night for Larry and Mitchell, there was no reason not to start drinking immediately. By early afternoon they were in the Luxembourg Gardens, sharing a bottle of vin de table. The sky had grown cloudy, casting the flowers and yellow gravel paths in a sharp gray light. Old men were playing boules nearby, bending at the knee and releasing silver balls from their fingertips. The balls made pleasant clicks when they struck one another. The sound of satisfactory, social democratic retirement.

  Claire had changed into a sundress and a pair of sandals. She didn’t shave her legs, and the hair on them was slight and blond, tapering out at her thighs. She seemed to have forgiven Mitchell. He, in turn, was doing his best to be likeable.

  Under the influence of the wine Mitchell began to feel happier, his jet lag in temporary remission. They walked down to the Seine, across the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens. Sanitation workers were sweeping the parks and sweeping the curbs, their uniforms impossibly clean.

  Larry said that he wanted to cook dinner, so Claire, who no longer kept kosher, took them to an outdoor market near her building. Larry plunged in among the stalls, ogling produce, sniffing cheeses. He bought carrots, fennel, and potatoes, conversing with the farmers. The poultry stand made him stop and put a hand to his chest. “Oh my God, poularde de Bresse! That’s what I’m making!”

  Back at Claire’s apartment, Larry unwrapped the chicken with a flourish. “Poulet bleu. See? They’ve got these blue feet. That’s how you know they come from Bresse. We used to roast these at the restaurant. They’re fabulous.”

  He set to work in the tiny kitchen, chopping and salting, melting butter, three pans going at once.

  “I’m sleeping with Julia Child,” Claire said.

  “More like the Galloping Gourmet,” Mitchell said.

  She laughed. “Honey?” she said, kissing Larry’s cheek. “I’m going to go read while you obsess over your little chicken.”

  Claire settled on the bed with her anthology. Hit by a new surge of fatigue, Mitchell wished he could lie down, too. Instead, he unzipped his backpack, digging under his clothes for the books he’d brought along. Mitchell had tried to travel as light as possible, packing two of everything, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, plus a sweater. But when it came time to winnow the stack of reading material, he’d failed to be stringent, bringing with him a cache that included The Imitation of Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, Merton’s Dark Night of the Soul, Tolstoy’s A Confession and Other Religious Writings, and a sizeable paperback of Pynchon’s V., along with a hardback edition of God Biology: Toward a Theistic Understanding of Evolution. Finally, before leaving New York, Mitchell picked up a copy of A Moveable Feast at St. Mark’s Bookshop. His plan was to send each book back home when he finished it, or to give it away to anyone who was interested.

  He took the Hemingway out now, sitting down at the dining table, and read from where he’d left off:

  The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

  I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

  He tried to imagine what it had been like to be Hemingway, in Paris, in the 1920s. To write those clear, seemingly unadorned, yet complex sentences that would change forever the way Americans wrote prose. To do all that and then go out to dinner where you knew how to order the perfect seasonal wine t
o go with your huîtres. To be an American in Paris back when it was O.K. to be American.

  “Are you actually reading that?”

  Mitchell looked up to find Claire staring at him from the bed.

  “Hemingway?” she said dubiously.

  “I thought it would be good for Paris.”

  She rolled her eyes and went back to her book. And Mitchell went back to his. Or tried. Except that now all he could do was stare at the page.

  He was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals. Mitchell thought this was an instance of tarring with too wide a brush. If he was to argue this with Claire, however, he ran the risk of being labeled a misogynist himself. More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?

  Rereading Hemingway’s sentences, Mitchell recognized that they were, indeed, implicitly addressed to the male reader.

  He crossed and uncrossed his legs, trying to concentrate on his book. He felt embarrassed to be reading Hemingway and angry about being made to feel embarrassed. It wasn’t as if Hemingway was even his favorite writer! He’d hardly read any Hemingway!

  Fortunately, a little while later, Larry announced that dinner was served.

  At the small table meant to accomodate a Parisian bachelor, Claire and Mitchell sat while Larry served them. He carved the chicken, sequestering the white meat, dark meat, and drumsticks on a platter, and spooned out the dripping vegetables.

  “Yum,” Claire said.

  The chicken was scrawny by American standards, and cosmetically inferior. One leg seemed to have acne.

  Mitchell took a bite.

  “Huh?” Larry prompted. “Did I tell you or did I tell you?”

  “You told us,” Mitchell said.

  When they were finished eating, Mitchell insisted on doing the dishes. He stacked them next to the sink while Larry and Claire carried what was left of the wine over to the bed. Claire had taken off her sandals and was now barefoot. She stretched her legs across Larry’s lap, sipping from her glass.

  Mitchell rinsed the dishes under the tap. The European dish soap was either eco-friendly or tariff-protected. Either way it didn’t make enough suds. Mitchell got the dishes reasonably clean and quit. He’d been awake, at that point, for thirty-three hours.

  He came back into the main room. On the bed, Larry and Claire were a Keith Haring: two loving human figures that fit perfectly together. Mitchell observed them for a long moment. Then, with sudden resolve, he crossed the room and hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders.

  “Where’s the best place to find a hotel around here?” he asked.

  There was a pause before Claire said, “You can stay here.”

  “That’s O.K. I’ll find a hotel.”

  He hooked his waist strap.

  Without arguing, Claire jumped right in to giving directions. “If you take a right outside my building, and then a left at the next street, you’ll come to Avenue Rapp. There’s a lot of hotels on that.”

  “Mitchell, stay,” Larry urged. “It’s cool with us if you stay.”

  In what he hoped was an unaggrieved tone, Mitchell said, “I’ll just get a room someplace. See you guys tomorrow.”

  He didn’t realize the hall was dark until he’d shut the door behind him. He couldn’t see a thing. He was about to knock on Claire’s door again when he noticed an illuminated button on the wall. When he pressed it, the corridor lights came on.

  He was descending past the third floor when the lights timed out again. This time, he couldn’t find a button, and so had to grope his way down two more flights to the lobby.

  When he reached the street, Mitchell saw that it had begun to rain.

  He’d foreseen a moment like this, where he would be exiled from the warm, dry sublet so that Larry could peel off Claire’s clothes and press his face between her coltish legs. That he had foreseen this moment but hadn’t managed to prevent it seemed only, as he turned toward Avenue Rapp, to confirm his basic stupidity. It was the stupidity of an intelligent person, but stupidity nonetheless.

  The force of the rain increased as Mitchell wandered the surrounding blocks. The quarter, which had looked so charming from Claire’s window, seemed less so now, on the street, in the rain. The shops were shuttered, graffiti-covered, the sodium-vapor streetlamps giving off an evil light.

  Hadn’t they just gotten out of college? Weren’t they finished with undergraduate politics? And yet here they were, staying with a women’s studies major on a junior-year-abroad program. Under the pretense of becoming a critic of patriarchy, Claire uncritically accepted every fashionable theory that came her way. Mitchell was glad to be out of her apartment. He was happy to be out in the rain! It was worth it to pay for a hotel if it meant not listening to Claire spout her platitudes for one more second! How could Larry stand going out with her? How could Larry have a girlfriend like that? What was the matter with him?

  It was possible, of course, that some of the anger Mitchell felt at Claire was misdirected. It was possible that the female he was really mad at was Madeleine. All summer long, while Mitchell had been in Detroit, he’d been under the illusion that Madeleine was available again. The thought that Bankhead had been dumped, and was suffering, had never failed to lift Mitchell’s spirits. He’d even rationalized that it had been a good thing that Madeleine had gone out with Bankhead. She needed to get guys like him out of her system. She needed to grow up, as Mitchell did, too, before they could be together.

  Then, less than forty-eight hours ago, on the night before he left for Paris, Mitchell had run into Madeleine on the Lower East Side. He and Larry had taken the train from Riverdale into the city. They were sitting in Downtown Beirut, around ten p.m., when, out of the blue, Madeleine had come in with Kelly Traub. Larry had directed Kelly in a show once. They immediately started talking shop, leaving Madeleine and Mitchell alone. At first, Mitchell had been worried that Madeleine was still mad at him, but even in the feeble lighting of the bombed-out bar, he could tell that wasn’t the case. She seemed genuinely pleased to see him, and, in his elation, Mitchell had started doing tequila shots. The night proceeded from there. They left Downtown Beirut and went somewhere else. Mitchell knew it was hopeless. He was about to leave for Europe. But it was summer, in New York, the streets as hot as Bangkok, and Madeleine was pressing against him as they rode across town in a cab. The last thing Mitchell remembered, he was standing outside a different bar, in Greenwich Village, blurrily watching Madeleine get into another cab, alone. He was wildly happy. But when he went back inside the bar and started talking to Kelly, he discovered that Madeleine was not, in fact, available at all. Madeleine and Bankhead had gotten back together shortly after graduation and were now about to move to Cape Cod.

  The only thing that had cheered him up over the summer had been an illusion. Now, in his disappointment, Mitchell tried to forget about Madeleine and to concentrate on the fact that the last three months had at least put money in his pocket. He’d gone back to Detroit to live rent-free. His parents were happy to have him at home, and Mitchell was happy to have his mother cook his meals and do his laundry while he searched the classifieds. It had never occurred to him how few useful skills he’d acquired in college. There were no openings for religious studies tutors. The ad that caught his attention read: “Drivers Wanted—All Shifts.” On the basis of his valid driver’s license alone, Mitchell was hired the same night. He worked twelve-hour shifts, from six p.m. to six a.m., plying Detroit’s East Side. At the wheels of
the badly maintained cabs, which he had to rent from the taxi company, Mitchell trolled deserted streets for fares or, to save gas, parked down by the river, waiting for a call to come over the radio. Detroit wasn’t a taxi town. There was almost no foot traffic. No one hailed him from the curb, especially at three or four in the morning. The other cabdrivers were a meager bunch. Instead of the plucky immigrants or wise-talking locals he’d expected to find, the crew was made up of serious losers. These were guys who had clearly failed at every other job they’d had. They had failed manning gas pumps, failed selling popcorn at movie concession stands, failed helping brothers-in-law install PVC piping in low-end condominiums, failed in committing petty crime, in collecting trash, in doing yard work, failed in schools and in marriages, and now they were here, failing as cabdrivers in desperate Detroit. The only other educated driver, who had a law degree, was in his sixties and had been let go from his firm for emotional instability. Late at night, when radio traffic reached a standstill, the drivers gathered in a lot by the river, near the old Medusa Cement plant. Mitchell listened to their conversations, saying nothing, remaining aloof lest they realize where he came from. He tried to seem tightly wound, doing his best Travis Bickle, to keep anyone from messing with him. It worked. The other guys left him alone. Then he drove off, parked on a dead-end street, and read The Aspern Papers with a flashlight.

  He drove a single mother with four kids from one ramshackle house to another at three in the morning. He ferried a surprisingly polite drug dealer to a drop-off. He took a smooth Billy Dee Williams lookalike with crimped hair and gold chains to sweet-talk his way past the police lock of a woman who didn’t seem to want to let him in, but did.

  What the cabbies talked about in the roundups was always the same thing: a report that one of them, from the thirty or so working, had actually made money. Every night at least one driver pulled in two or three hundred bucks. Most guys didn’t seem to be making anything like that much. After a week on the job, Mitchell added up his total fares against what he’d paid for the cab and gas. He divided this by the number of hours worked and came up with an hourly wage of −$0.76. Essentially, he was paying East Side Taxi to drive its cars.