The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [202]
It was comforting to learn that homosexual relationships were just as screwed up as straight ones, but Mitchell made no comment. Over the next three months, as they traveled over the subcontinent, Iannis wasn’t mentioned again. They visited Mysore, Cochin, Mahabalipuram, staying no more than a night or two in any place, heading back north, reaching Agra in March and making their way to Varanasi (they sometimes used Hindi names now) and back to Calcutta to meet Professor Hughes and begin their job as research assistants. With Hughes they ended up in remote villages without plumbing. They defecated side by side, squatting in open fields. They had adventures, saw holy men walk across hot coals, filmed interviews with great choreographers of masked Indian dance, and met an actual maharaja, who had a palace but no money and used a tattered “brolly” as a parasol. By April, the weather was turning hot. The monsoons were still months away, but Mitchell could already feel the climate growing inhospitable. By the end of May, oppressed by increasing temperatures and feelings of aimlessness, he decided that it was time to go home. Larry wanted to see Nepal, and stayed on a few more weeks.
From Calcutta, Mitchell flew back to Paris, staying a few days in a decent hotel and availing himself of his credit card for the last time. (He wouldn’t be able to justify it once he returned to the States.) Just as he was adjusting to the European time zone, he took a charter flight back to JFK. And so he was alone, in New York, when he learned that Madeleine had married Leonard Bankhead.
Mitchell’s strategy of waiting out the recession hadn’t worked. The unemployment rate was 10.1 percent the month he returned. From the window of his shuttle bus into Manhattan, Mitchell saw shuttered businesses, their windows soaped over. There were more people living on the street, plus a new term for them: the homeless. His own money pouch contained only $270 worth of traveler’s checks and a twenty-rupee note he’d kept as a souvenir. Not wanting to shell out for a hotel in New York, he’d called Dan Schneider from Grand Central, asking if he could crash at his place for a few days, and Schneider said yes.
Mitchell took the shuttle to Times Square, then hopped on the 1 train to Seventy-ninth Street. Schneider buzzed him in and was waiting in his doorway when Mitchell reached his floor. They hugged briefly, and Schneider said, “Whoa, Grammaticus. You’re a little ripe.”
Mitchell averred that he’d stopped using deodorant in India.
“Yeah, well, this is America,” Schneider said. “And it’s summertime. Get yourself some Old Spice, man.”
Schneider dressed all in black to match his beard and cowboy boots. His apartment was fussily nice, with built-in bookcases and a collection of iridescent ceramics made by an artist he “collected.” He had a decent job grant-writing at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and was happy to buy Mitchell drinks at Dublin House, the bar close to his building. Over pints of Guinness, Schneider filled Mitchell in on all the Brown-related gossip he’d missed while in India. Lollie Ames had moved to Rome and was dating a forty-year-old. Tony Perotti, the campus anarchist, had wimped out and gone to law school. Thurston Meems had made a tape of his own faux-naïf music on which he accompanied himself on a Casio. All this was fairly amusing until Schneider suddenly said, “Oh, shit! I forgot. Your girl Madeleine