The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Pigalle was both seedy and touristy. A foursome of Americans with southern accents stood outside the Moulin Rouge, the husbands ogling the photos of the dancers, while one of the wives sassed, “You boys buy us something at Cartier’s, we might let you see the show.” Beyond the Art Nouveau entrance of the métro station a streetwalker was pelvically beckoning motorists. Wherever Mitchell went along the sloping streets of the neighborhood, the white dome of Sacré Coeur remained in view. Finally, he climbed the hill and entered the church’s massive doors. The vault seemed to draw him upward like liquid in a syringe. Imitating the other worshippers, he crossed himself and genuflected as he entered a pew, the gestures making him feel instantly reverent. It was amazing that all this was still going on. Closing his eyes, Mitchell recited the Jesus Prayer for five or six minutes.

  On his way out, he stopped in the gift store to examine the paraphernalia. There were gold crosses, silver crosses, scapulars of various colors and shapes, something called a “Veronica,” something else called “the Black Scapular of the Seven Dolours of Mary.” Rosaries gleamed in the glass case, black-beaded, each a circular invitation, with a crucifix distending from the end.

  Beside the cash register, a small book was prominently displayed. It was called Something Beautiful for God and showed on its cover a photograph of Mother Teresa, casting her eyes heavenward. Mitchell picked the book up and read the first page:

  I should explain, in the first place, that Mother Teresa has requested that nothing in the nature of a biography or biographical study of her should be attempted. “Christ’s life,” she wrote to me, “was not written during his lifetime, yet he did the greatest work on earth—he redeemed the world and taught mankind to love his Father. The Work is his Work and to remain so, all of us are but his instruments, who do our little bit and pass by.” I respect her wishes in this, as in all other matters. What we are expressly concerned with here is the work she and her Missionaries of Charity—an order she founded—do together, and the life they live together, in the service of Christ, in Calcutta and elsewhere. Their special dedication is to the poorest of the poor; a wide field indeed.

  A few years ago, Mitchell would have set the book back down, if not ignored it altogether. But in his new state of mind, enhanced by his time in the cathedral, he paged through the illustrations, which were listed as follows: “A board outside the Home for the Dying”; “A frail baby enfolded in the arms of Mother Teresa”; “An ailing woman hugs Mother Teresa”; “A man suffering from leprosy has his nails cut”; “Mother Teresa helps a boy too weak to feed himself.”

  Exceeding his budget twice in the same morning, Mitchell bought the book, paying twenty-eight francs.

  On a quiet street off Rue des Trois-Frères, he took the AmEx serial numbers out of his money pouch and wrote them down in the back of Something Beautiful for God.

  Throughout the day, Mitchell’s hunger came and went. Toward afternoon, it came and stuck around. Passing sidewalk cafés, he eyed the food on people’s plates. Just after two-thirty, he broke down and had a café au lait, standing up at the counter to save two francs. He spent the rest of the day at the Musée Jean Moulin because it was free.

  When Mitchell got to Claire’s sublet that evening, Larry opened the door. Inside, instead of a languorous postcoital atmosphere, Mitchell detected a whiff of strain. Larry had opened a bottle of wine, which he was drinking alone. Claire was on the bed, reading. She smiled perfunctorily at Mitchell but didn’t get up to greet him.

  Larry asked, “So, did you find a hotel?”

  “No, I slept in the streets.”

  “You did not.”

  “All the hotels were full! I had to share a room with this guy. The same bed.”

  Larry visibly enjoyed this news. “Sorry, Mitchell,” he said.

  “You went to bed with a guy?” Claire spoke up from the bed. “On your first night in Paris?”

  “Gay Paree,” Larry said, filling a glass for Mitchell.

  After a few more minutes, Claire went to the bathroom to wash up for dinner. As soon as she shut the door behind her, Mitchell leaned toward Larry. “O.K., we’ve seen Paris. Now let’s go.”

  “Very funny, Mitchell.”

  “You said we’d have a place to stay.”

  “We do have a place.”

  “You do.”

  Larry lowered his voice. “I’m not going to see Claire for six months, maybe more. What can I do? Stay here one night and then split?”

  “Good idea.”

  Larry gazed up at Mitchell. “You look really pale,” he said.

  “That’s because I haven’t eaten all day. And you know why I haven’t eaten? Because I spent forty dollars on a room!”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “This was not the plan,” Mitchell said.

  “The plan was to have no plans.”

  “Except that you’ve got a plan. Getting laid.”

  “And you wouldn’t?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “So there you go.”

  The two friends faced each other, neither giving way.

  “Three days and we’re out of here,” Mitchell said.

  Claire came out of the bathroom, holding a hairbrush. She bent over so that her long tresses fell forward, nearly touching the ground. For a full thirty seconds she combed her mane with downward strokes before snapping up and flinging her hair behind her, smooth and puffed out.

  She asked where they wanted to eat.

  Larry was putting on his unisex tennies. “How about couscous?” Larry said. “Mitchell, have you ever had couscous?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you have got to have couscous.”

  Claire made a wry face. “Whenever somebody comes to Paris,” she said, “they have to go to the Latin Quarter and have couscous. Couscous in the Latin Quarter is so encoded!”

  “You want to go somewhere else?” Larry said.

  “No,” Claire said. “Let’s be unoriginal.”

  When they got down to the street, Larry put his arm around Claire, whispering in her ear. Mitchell followed behind.

  They zigzagged across the city, in evening’s flattering light. Parisians looked good already; now they looked even better.

  The restaurant Claire took them to, in the Latin Quarter’s narrow streets, was small and hectic, the walls covered in Moroccan tiles. Mitchell sat facing the window, watching the people streaming past outside. At one point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a Joan of Arc haircut, passed right in front of the glass. When Mitchell looked at her, the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank sexual meaning. Not that she wanted to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that.

  Deanie was right: Europe was a nice spot.

  Mitchell kept his eyes on the woman until she had disappeared. When he turned back to the table, Claire was staring at him, shaking her head.

  “Pivot head,” she said.

  “What?”

  “On the way over here you checked out every single woman we passed.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Foreign country,” Mitchell said, trying to make light of it. “I’m taking an anthropological interest.”

  “So you see women as some tribe you have to study?”

  “You’re in for it now, Mitchell,” Larry said. He was obviously going to be of no help whatsoever.

  Claire was looking at Mitchell with undisguised contempt. “Do you always objectify women or just when you’re traveling in Europe?”

  “Just looking at women doesn’t mean I objectify them.”

  “What are you doing to them, then?”

  “Looking at them.”

  “Because you want to fuck them.”

  This was, more
or less, true. Suddenly, in the castigating light of Claire’s gaze, Mitchell was ashamed of himself. He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he’d been a naughty boy.

  In response to this shame, Mitchell did another guy thing. He went silent. After they ordered, and the wine and food arrived, he concentrated on eating and drinking and said very little. Claire and Larry seemed to forget he was there. They talked and laughed. They fed each other forkfuls of food.

  Outside, the crowds were getting even thicker. Mitchell tried his best not to stare out the window but suddenly something caught his eye. It was a woman in a tight dress and black boots.

  “Oh, my God!” Claire screamed. “He did it again!”

  “I was just looking out the window!”

  “You are such a pivot head!”

  “What do you want me to do? Wear a blindfold?”

  But Claire was happy now. She was ecstatic at her victory over Mitchell, made so obvious by his visible discomfort. Her cheeks flushed with pleasure.

  “Your friend hates me,” she said, leaning her head against Larry’s shoulder.

  Larry lifted his eyes to Mitchell’s eyes, not unsympathetically. He put his arm around Claire.

  Mitchell didn’t begrudge him that. He would have done the same in Larry’s position.

  As soon as dinner was over, Mitchell excused himself, saying he felt like taking a walk.

  “Don’t be mad at me!” Claire pleaded. “You can look at all the women you want. I promise I won’t say a thing.”

  “That’s O.K.,” Mitchell said. “I’m just going back to my hotel.”

  “Come by Claire’s tomorrow morning,” Larry said, trying to ease things. “We can go to the Louvre.”

  At first, fury alone propelled Mitchell. Claire wasn’t the first college girl to call him out for sexist behavior. It had been happening for years. Mitchell had always assumed that his father’s generation were the bad guys. Those old farts who’d never washed a dish or folded socks—they were the real target of feminist rage. But that had been merely the first assault. Now, in the eighties, arguments about the equitable division of household chores, or the inherent sexism of holding a door open for “a lady,” were old arguments. The movement had become less pragmatic and more theoretical. Male oppression of women wasn’t just a matter of certain deeds but of an entire way of seeing and thinking. College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology’s? But no—anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the “women” Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. Girls were always going on about “male bonding,” too. Anytime two or more guys were having a good time, some girl had to make it sound pathological. What was so great about feminine friendships, Mitchell wanted to know? Maybe they could use a little female bonding.

  Fulminating like this, talking under his breath, Mitchell found himself at the Seine. He began crossing one of the bridges—the Pont Neuf. The sun had set and the streetlamps come on. Halfway out, in one of the semicircular seating areas, a group of teenagers had gathered. A guy with pouffy, Jean-Luc Ponty hair was strumming an acoustic guitar while his friends listened, smoking and passing a wine bottle around.

  Mitchell watched them as he passed by. Even as a teenager he hadn’t been a teenager like that.

  A little farther on, he leaned against the railing and stared down at the dark river. His anger had subsided, replaced by a general displeasure with himself.

  It was probably true that he objectified women. He thought about them all the time, didn’t he? He looked at them a lot. And didn’t all this thinking and looking involve their breasts and lips and legs? Female human beings were objects of the most intense interest and scrutiny on Mitchell’s part. And yet he didn’t think that a word like objectification covered the way these alluring—but intelligent!—creatures made him feel. What Mitchell felt when he saw a beautiful girl was more like something from a Greek myth, like being transformed, by the sight of beauty, into a tree, rooted on the spot, forever, out of pure desire. You couldn’t feel about an object the way Mitchell felt about girls.

  Excusez-moi: women.

  There was another point in Claire’s favor. All the while she’d been accusing Mitchell of objectifying women, he’d been secretly objectifying her. She had such an incredible ass! It was so round and perfect and alive. Every time Mitchell stole a glance at her ass he had the weird feeling that it was staring back, that Claire’s ass didn’t necessarily agree with its owner’s feminist politics but was perfectly happy to be admired, that Claire’s ass, in other words, had a mind of its own. Plus, Claire was his best friend’s girlfriend. She was off-limits. This wildly increased her appeal.

  A tour boat ablaze with lights passed under the bridge.

  The more Mitchell read about religions, the world religions in general and Christianity in particular, the more he realized that the mystics were all saying the same thing. Enlightenment came from the extinction of desire. Desire didn’t bring fulfillment but only temporary satiety until the next temptation came along. And that was only if you were lucky enough to get what you wanted. If you didn’t, you spent your life in unrequited longing.

  How long had he been secretly hoping to marry Madeleine Hanna? And how much of his desire to marry Madeleine came from really and truly liking her as a person, and how much from the wish to possess her and, in so doing, gratify his ego?

  It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.

  The troubadour was playing a Neil Young song, reproducing the lyrics down to their last twang and whine without knowing what they meant. Older, better-dressed people were promenading by toward the floodlit buildings on either bank. Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river’s arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.

  For a long time the gods had been in close contact with humanity. Then they became disgusted, or discouraged, and they removed themselves. But maybe they would come back again, approach the stray soul who was still curious.

  Returning to his hotel, Mitchell hung out in the lobby on the off chance some friendly English-speaking travelers showed up. None did. He went up to his room, got a towel, and took a tepid shower in the communal bathroom. At his present rate of expenditure, Mitchell’s money would never hold out long enough for them to get to India. He had to start living differently tomorrow.

  Back in his room, he pulled down the mouse-colored bedspread and climbed naked into bed. The bedside lamp was too dim to read by, so he removed the shade.

  Part of the work of the Sisters is to pick up the dying from the streets of Calcutta, and bring them into a building given to Mother Teresa for the purpose (a sometimes temple dedicated to the cult of the goddess Kali), there, as she puts it, to die within sight of a loving face. Some do die, others survive and are cared for. This Home for the
Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We had only one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused.

  How to account for this? Ken has all along insisted that, technically speaking, the result is quite impossible. To prove the point, on his next filming expedition—to the Middle East—he used some of the same stock in a similarly poor light, with completely negative results … Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying is overflowing with love, as one senses immediately on entering it. This love is luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints … I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle.

  Mitchell put the book down, switching off the light and stretching out in the lumpy bed. He thought about Claire, at first angrily but soon enough erotically. He imagined going to her apartment and finding her alone, and soon she was on her knees in front of him, taking him into her mouth. Mitchell felt guilty for fantasizing about his friend’s girlfriend but not guilty enough to stop. He didn’t like what this fantasy of Claire on her knees in front of him said about him, so next he imagined himself generously going down on her, making her come like she’d never come before. At this point he came himself. He turned onto his side, dripping onto the hotel carpet.