The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [36]
He recited the prayer for another minute, until he felt calmer. Then he got up and went out of the café. Across the street, the side doors of the church were open now. The organist was warming up, the music drifting out over the grass. Mitchell looked down the hill in the direction that Madeleine had disappeared. Seeing no sign of her, he started down Benefit on the way back to his apartment.
Mitchell’s relationship with Madeleine Hanna—his long, aspirational, sporadically promising yet frustrating relationship—had begun at a toga party during freshman orientation. It was the kind of thing he instinctively hated: a keg party based on a Hollywood movie, a capitulation to the mainstream. Mitchell hadn’t come to college to act like John Belushi. He hadn’t even seen Animal House. (He was an Altman fan.) The alternative, however, would have been to sit in his room alone, and so finally, in a spirit of refusal that didn’t include boycotting the party outright, he’d attended in his regular clothes. As soon as he arrived in the basement recreation room, he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d thought that not wearing a toga would make him seem too cool for such jejune festivities, but as he stood in the corner, drinking a plastic cup of foamy beer, Mitchell felt just as much like a misfit as he always did at parties full of popular people.
It was at this point that he noticed Madeleine. She was in the middle of the floor, dancing with a guy whom Mitchell recognized as an RA. Unlike most girls at the party, who looked dumpy in their togas, Madeleine had tied a cord around her waist, fitting her sheet to her body. Her hair was piled on top of her head, Roman-style, and her back was alluringly bare. Other than her exceptional looks, Mitchell noticed that she was an uninspired dancer—she held a beer and talked to the RA, barely paying attention to the beat—and that she kept leaving the party to go down the hall. The third time she was going out, Mitchell, emboldened by alcohol, went up to her and blurted out, “Where do you keep going?”
Madeleine wasn’t startled. She was probably used to strange guys trying to talk to her. “I’ll tell you, but you’ll think I’m weird.”
“No, I won’t,” Mitchell said.
“This is my dorm. I figured since everyone was going to the party, the washers would be free. So I decided to do my laundry at the same time.”
Mitchell took a sip of foam without taking his eyes off her. “Do you need help?”
“No,” Madeleine said, “I can handle it.” As if she thought this sounded mean, she added, “You can come watch, if you want. Laundry’s pretty exciting.”
She started down the cinder-block hallway and he followed at her side.
“Why aren’t you wearing a toga?” she asked him.
“Because it’s dumb!” Mitchell said, nearly shouting. “It’s so stupid!”
This wasn’t the best move, but Madeleine didn’t appear to take it personally. “I just came because I was bored,” she said. “If this wasn’t my dorm, I probably would have bagged.”
In the laundry room, Madeleine began pulling her damp underthings out of a coin-operated washer. For Mitchell, this was titillating enough. But in the next second, something unforgettable occurred. As Madeleine reached into the washer, the knot at her shoulder loosened and the bedsheet fell away.
It was amazing how an image like that—of nothing, really, just a few inches of epidermis—could persist in the mind with undiminished clarity. The moment had lasted no more than three seconds. Mitchell hadn’t been entirely sober at the time. And yet now, almost four years later, he could return to the moment at will (and it was surprising how often he wanted to do this), summoning all of its sensory details, the