The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [184]
“Is that why you’re calling?”
“No,” Alwyn said. “I told her if you want to marry him, it’s your business.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you still mad at me about the pills?” Alwyn said.
“Yes,” Madeleine said. “But I’ll get over it.”
“Are you sure you want to marry him?”
“Also yes.”
“O.K., then. It’s your funeral.”
“Hey, that’s mean!”
“I’m joking.”
Her parents’ official surrender, in February, only brought further conflict. Once Alton and Madeleine stopped arguing about the prenuptial agreement, and whether such a document, by its very nature, invalidated the trust any marriage needed to survive, once the document had been drawn up by Roger Pyle, Alton’s lawyer in town, and signed by both parties, Phyllida and Madeleine started arguing about the wedding itself. Madeleine wanted something small and intimate. Phyllida, aware of appearances, wanted to throw the kind of grand wedding she would have thrown had Madeleine been marrying somebody more suitable. She proposed holding a traditional wedding ceremony at their local parish, Trinity Episcopal, followed by a reception at the house. Madeleine said no. Alton then suggested an informal ceremony at the Century Club, in New York. Madeleine tentatively agreed to this. A week before the invitations were to go out, however, she and Leonard chanced upon an old mariner’s church on the outskirts of Provincetown. And it was there, in a stark, lonely space at the end of a deserted peninsula, a landscape befitting a Bergman film, that Madeleine and Leonard were married. Phyllida and Alton’s most loyal friends made the trek from Prettybrook to the Cape. Madeleine’s uncles, aunts, and cousins were there, as well as Alwyn, Blake, and Richard. Leonard’s family came, his father, and his mother and sister, all of whom seemed a lot nicer than Leonard’s descriptions. The majority of the forty-six guests were Madeleine’s and Leonard’s friends from college, who treated the ceremony less as a religious rite than as an occasion to cheer and hoot.
At the rehearsal dinner Leonard played a Latvian love song on the kokle, while Kelly Traub, whose grandparents were from Riga, sang along. He made a simple toast at the wedding banquet, alluding to his breakdown so tactfully that only those in the know got the reference, and thanking Madeleine for being his “ministering Victorian angel.” At midnight, after changing into their traveling clothes, they took a limousine to the Four Seasons in Boston, where they immediately fell asleep. The next afternoon, they left for Europe.
Looking back, Madeleine thought that she might have picked up the warning signs more quickly if she hadn’t been on her honeymoon. She was so excited to be in Paris, at the height of spring, that for the first week everything seemed perfect. They stayed at the same hotel where Phyllida and Alton had spent their honeymoon, a three-star place now well past its prime, staffed by white-haired waiters who carried trays at precarious angles. The hotel was thoroughly French, however. (Leonard said he saw a mouse wearing a beret.) There were no other Americans there, and it looked out on the Jardin des Plantes. Leonard had never been to Europe before. It made Madeleine happy to show Leonard around, to be more knowledgeable about something than he was.
The restaurants made him nervous. “We have four different waiters serving our table,” he said on their third night in the city, as they dined in a restaurant overlooking the Seine. “Four. I counted. One guy’s just for sweeping up bread crumbs.”
In passable Lawrenceville French, Madeleine did the ordering for both of them. The first course was vichyssoise.
After tasting it, Leonard said, “I’m guessing this is supposed to be cold.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Cold soup. New concept.”
The dinner was everything she wanted her honeymoon to be. Leonard looked so handsome, dressed in his wedding suit. Madeleine felt beautiful herself, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, her hair thick on the nape of her neck. They were both as physically perfect