The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [38]
A year went by like this. An entire blue-balled year. Mitchell stopped dropping by Madeleine’s room. Gradually, they drifted into different circles. He didn’t forget about her so much as decide that she was out of his league. Whenever he ran into her, she was so talkative and touched his arm so often that he began to get ideas again, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that anything came close to happening. In November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Mitchell mentioned that he was planning to stay on campus over break rather than fly back to Detroit, and Madeleine surprised him by inviting him to celebrate the holiday with her family in Prettybrook.
They arranged to meet at the Amtrak station, on Wednesday at noon. When Mitchell got there, lugging a prewar suitcase with some dead person’s fading gold initials on it, he found Madeleine waiting for him on the platform, wearing glasses. They were large tortoiseshell frames and, if it was possible, they made him like her even more. The lenses were badly scratched and the left temple was slightly bent. Otherwise, Madeleine was as well put together as always, or even more so, since she was on her way to see her parents.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Mitchell said.
“My contacts were hurting my eyes this morning.”
“I like them.”
“I only wear them sometimes. My eyes aren’t that bad.”
As he stood on the platform, Mitchell wondered if Madeleine’s wearing her glasses indicated that she felt comfortable around him, or if it meant that she didn’t care about looking her best for him. Once they were on the train, amid the crowd of holiday travelers, it was impossible to tell either way. After they found two seats together, Madeleine took her glasses off, holding them in her lap. As the train rolled out of Providence, she put them on again to watch the passing scenery, but quickly snatched them off, shoving them into her bag. (This was the reason her glasses were in the shape they were in; she’d lost the case long ago.)
The trip took five hours. Mitchell wouldn’t have minded if it had taken five days. It was thrilling to have Madeleine captive in the seat beside him. She’d brought volume one of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and, in what appeared to be a guilty traveling habit, a thick copy of Vogue. Mitchell stared out at the warehouses and body shops of Cranston before pulling out his Finnegans Wake.
“You’re not reading that,” Madeleine said.
“I am.”
“No way!”
“It’s about a river,” Mitchell said. “In Ireland.”
The train proceeded along the Rhode Island coast and into Connecticut. Sometimes the ocean appeared, or marshland, then just as suddenly they were passing along the ugly backside of a manufacturing town. In New Haven the train stopped to switch engines before proceeding to Grand Central. After taking the subway to Penn Station, Madeleine led Mitchell down to another set of tracks to catch the train for New Jersey. They arrived at Prettybrook just before eight at night.
The Hannas’ house was a hundred-year-old Tudor, fronted by London plane trees and dying hemlocks. Inside, everything was tasteful and half falling apart. The Oriental carpets had stains. The brick-red kitchen linoleum was thirty years old. When Mitchell used the powder room, he saw that the toilet paper dispenser had been repaired with Scotch tape. So had the peeling wallpaper in the hallway. Mitchell had encountered shabby gentility before, but here was Wasp thrift in its purest form. The plaster ceilings sagged alarmingly. Vestigial burglar alarms sprouted from the walls. The knob-and-tube wiring sent flames out of the lighting sockets when you unplugged anything.
Mitchell was good with parents. Parents were his specialty. Within an hour of arriving Wednesday night, he had established himself as a favorite. He knew the lyrics to the Cole Porter songs Alton played on the “hi-fi.” He allowed Alton to read excerpts from Kingsley Amis’s On Drink aloud, and seemed to find them just as hilarious as Alton did. At dinner, Mitchell talked about Sandra Day O’Connor with