The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [185]
They spent the next days sightseeing. To Madeleine’s surprise, Leonard was less interested in museums and churches than in the merchandise in the shop windows. He kept stopping along the Champs-Élysées to admire things he’d never shown interest in before—suits, shirts, cuff links, Hermès neckties. Wandering the narrow streets of the Marais, he stopped outside a tailor shop. In the slightly dusty window was a headless mannequin and on the mannequin was a black opera cloak. Leonard went inside to look at it.
“This is really nice,” he said, examining the satin lining.
“It’s a cape,” Madeleine said.
“You’d never find anything like this in the States,” Leonard said.
And he bought it, spending way too much (in her opinion) of his last monthly stipend from Pilgrim Lake. The tailor wrapped the garment up and put it in a box, and soon Leonard was carrying it out the door. The cape was an odd thing to want, no question, but it wasn’t the first strange souvenir someone had bought in Paris. Madeleine quickly forgot about it.
That night, a rainstorm swept over the city. Around two in the morning, they were awakened by water dripping from the ceiling above the bed. A call to the front desk produced a bellman with a bucket, no apology, and a vague promise about an “ingénieur” coming in the morning. By positioning the bucket just so, and lying head to toe, Madeleine and Leonard managed to find a position in which to stay dry, though the dripping kept them awake.
“This is our first marital mishap,” Leonard said softly, in the dark. “We’re handling it. We’re dealing with it.”
It wasn’t until they left Paris that anything seemed the matter. From the Gare de Lyon they took an overnight train to Marseille, occupying a romantic sleeper cabin that made romance impossible. With its disorder, sense of danger, and mixed population, Marseille seemed like an American city, or merely less French. A Mediterranean-Arabic atmosphere prevailed; the air smelled of fish, motor oil, and verbena. Women in head-scarves called to broods of brown-skinned children. At a zinc bar on their first night, sometime past two a.m., Leonard became instant friends with a group of Moroccans in soccer jerseys and flea market jeans. Madeleine was exhausted; she wanted to go back to the hotel, but Leonard insisted that they had to have café cognac. He’d been picking up words along the way, deploying them every so often as though this meant that he actually spoke French. When he learned a slang term (the word branché, for instance, when applied to persons, meant that they were “plugged in”), Leonard told it to Madeleine as if he were the fluent speaker. He corrected her pronunciation. At first, she thought he must be joking, but this didn’t seem to be the case.
From Marseille they traveled east along the coast. When a dining-car waiter came to take their order, Leonard insisted on ordering in French. He got the words out, but his pronunciation was atrocious. Madeleine repeated Leonard’s request. When she finished, Leonard was glaring at her.
“What?”
“Why did you order for me?”
“Because the waiter didn’t understand you.”
“He understood me fine,” Leonard insisted.
It was evening by the time they reached Nice. After checking into their hotel, they went out to a small restaurant down the street. Throughout dinner, Leonard was conscientiously distant. He drank a lot of house wine. His eyes glittered whenever the young waitress came over to their table. For nearly the entire meal Madeleine and Leonard sat without speaking, like a couple married for twenty years. Returning to their hotel, Madeleine used the bad-smelling communal WC. While she was peeing, she read the sign in French that