The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [155]
“Marry me,” he said.
Asleep in the Lord
Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.
For the past three weeks, Mitchell had been volunteering at the Home for Dying Destitutes. He’d been going five days a week, from nine in the morning until a little after one, and doing whatever needed doing. This included giving the men medicine, feeding them, administering head massages, sitting on their beds and providing company, looking into their faces and holding their hands. It wasn’t something you had to learn how to do, and yet, in his twenty-two years on the planet, Mitchell had done few of these things before and some of them not at all.
He’d been traveling for four months, visiting three different continents and nine different countries, but Calcutta felt like the first real place he’d been. This had partly to do with the fact that he was alone. He missed having Larry around. Before Mitchell left Athens, when they’d made their plans to reunite in the spring, the discussion had skirted around the reason Larry was staying on in Greece. That Larry was now sleeping with men wasn’t a big deal in the larger scheme of things. But it cast a complicating light on their friendship—and especially the drunken night in Venice—and made them both feel awkward.
If Mitchell had been able to return Larry’s affection, his life might have been a lot different right now. As it was, the whole thing was beginning to look fairly comical and Shakespearean: Larry loved Mitchell, who loved Madeleine, who loved Leonard Bankhead. Being alone, in the poorest city on earth, where he didn’t know anyone, pay phones were non existent, and mail service slow, didn’t end this romantic farce, but it got Mitchell offstage.
The other reason Calcutta felt real was that he was here for a purpose. Until now he’d been merely sightseeing. The best he could say about his travels so far was that they described the route of a pilgrimage that had led him to his present location.
He’d spent his first week in the city exploring. He’d attended mass at an Anglican church with a gaping hole in the roof and a congregation of six octogenarians. At a Communist playhouse, he’d sat through a three-hour production of Mother Courage in Bengali. He’d walked up and down Chowringhee Road, past astrologers reading faded Tarot cards and barbers cutting hair while squatting at the curb. A street vendor had summoned Mitchell over to look at his wares: a pair of prescription eyeglasses and a used toothbrush. The uninstalled sewer pipe in the road was big enough for a family to camp inside. At the Bank of India, the businessman in front of Mitchell in line was wearing a solar-powered wristwatch. The policemen directing traffic were as expressive as Toscanini. The cows were skinny and wore eye makeup, like fashion models. Everything Mitchell saw, tasted, or smelled was different from what he was used to.
From the minute his plane touched down at Calcutta International Airport at two a.m., Mitchell had found India to be the perfect place to disappear. The trip into the city had proceeded through near-total darkness. Through the curtained rear window of the Ambassador cab, Mitchell discerned stands of eucalyptus trees lining the lightless highway. The apartment buildings, when they reached them, were hulking and dark. The only light came from bonfires burning in the middle of intersections.
The taxi had taken him to the Salvation Army Guest House, on Sudder Street, and it was there that he’d been staying ever since. His roommates were a thirty-seven-year-old German named Rüdiger and a Floridian named Mike, an ex–appliance salesman. The three of them shared a small guest lodge across from the crowded main building. The neighborhood around Sudder Street constituted the city’s minimal tourist