The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [209]
July turned into August and still Bankhead didn’t call. One weekend, Kelly Traub came down to Prettybrook, bringing the keys to Madeleine’s new apartment. Slowly, doing a little each day, Madeleine began to pack the things she wanted to bring with her to Manhattan. In the hot storage area of the attic, wearing a tennis skirt and bikini top, her back and shoulders glistening, she picked out furniture to have shipped and went through cupboards, looking for glasses and odds and ends. She was barely eating, however. She had crying jags. She wanted to go over the chain of events again and again, beginning with the honeymoon and leading up to the party at Schneider’s, as though she might find some moment when, had she acted differently, none of it would have happened. The only times Madeleine brightened were when an old girlfriend of hers came by the house. With her friends—and the earlier made and dippier they were, the better: she was hugely fond of certain ex–Lawrenceville girls with names like Weezie—Madeleine seemed to be able to will herself back to girlhood. She went into town shopping with these friends. She spent hours trying things on. At the house, they lay by the pool, tanning and reading magazines, while Mitchell drew away to the shade of the porch, watching them from afar with desire and revulsion, exactly as he had done in high school. Sometimes Madeleine and her friends, growing bored, tried to coax Mitchell to come for a swim, and he put down his Merton and stood poolside, trying not to stare at Madeleine’s near-naked body gliding through the water.
“Come on in, Mitchell!” she pleaded with him.
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Just wear shorts.”
“I’m opposed to shorts.”
Then the Lawrenceville girls left and Madeleine became intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess. She rejoined Mitchell on the porch, where the sun-warmed paperbacks and iced coffee awaited her.
Every so often, as the days passed, Alton or Phyllida would make an attempt to get Madeleine to decide what she wanted to do. But she kept putting them off.
September approached. Madeleine chose her fall semester seminars, one on the eighteenth-century novel (Pamela, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy) and another on triple-deckers, taught from a poststructuralist perspective by Jerome Shilts. Madeleine’s arrival at Columbia, it turned out, would coincide with the first class of women being admitted to the university as undergraduates, and she took this as a good omen.
As much as Madeleine wanted Mitchell around, as close as they’d become that summer, she gave no clear sign that her feelings about him had altered in any significant way. She became freer in her actions, changing clothes in front of him, only saying, “Don’t look.” And he didn’t. He averted his eyes, and listened to her undressing. Making a move on Madeleine seemed unfair. It would be taking advantage of her sadness. Being pawed by a guy was the last thing she needed right now.
One Saturday night, late, while Mitchell was reading in bed, he heard the door to the attic open. Madeleine came up to his room. Instead of sitting on his bed, however, she just poked her head in and said, “I want to show you something.” She disappeared. Mitchell waited while she shuffled around the attic, moving boxes. After a few minutes, she returned, holding a shoe box. In her other hand was an academic journal.
“Ta-da!” Madeleine said, handing the journal to him. “This came in the mail today.” It was a copy of The Janeite Review, edited by M. Myerson, and containing an essay by one Madeleine Hanna titled “I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot.” It was a marvelous thing to see, even though a printing error had transposed two pages of the essay. Madeleine looked happier than she