The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [48]
As for his own photograph in the Pig Book, Mitchell had mailed in a picture cut out of a Civil War history book, showing a lean-faced Lutheran minister with a white shock of hair, tiny spectacles, and an expression of moral outrage. The editors had obediently printed this above the caption Mitchell Grammaticus, Grosse Pointe, MI. Using the old man’s portrait relieved Mitchell of having to send an actual photo of himself, and of thereby entering into the beauty pageant that the Pig Book inevitably became. It was a way to erase his bodily self and replace it with a mark of his wit.
If Mitchell had hoped that his female classmates might see his joke photo and become interested in him, he was sadly disappointed. No one paid much attention. The boy whose photograph aroused feminine interest was Leonard Bankhead, Portland, OR. Bankhead had submitted a curious photo of himself standing in a snowy field, wearing a comically tall stocking cap. To Mitchell, Bankhead didn’t look particularly handsome or unhandsome. As freshman year progressed, however, stories of Bankhead’s sexual successes began to make their way into the zones of deprivation that served as Mitchell’s habitat. John Kass, who’d gone to high school with Bankhead’s roommate, claimed that Bankhead had made his friend sleep elsewhere so often that he’d finally applied for a single. One night Mitchell saw the legendary Bankhead at a party at West Quad, staring into a girl’s face as if attempting a mind-meld. Mitchell didn’t understand why girls couldn’t see through Bankhead. He thought that his Lothario reputation would decrease his appeal, but it had the opposite effect. The more girls Bankhead slept with, the more girls wanted to sleep with him. Which made Mitchell uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about girls in the first place.
Mercifully, freshman year finally came to an end. When Mitchell returned the following fall, there was a whole new crop of freshman girls, one of whom, a redhead from Oklahoma, became his girlfriend during spring term. He forgot about Bankhead. (Except for a reli. stu. course they were both in sophomore year, he hardly saw him for the remainder of college.) When the Oklahoman broke up with him, Mitchell went out with other girls, and slept with still others, leaving the zones of deprivation behind. Then, senior year, two months after the heating-gel incident, he heard that Madeleine had a new boyfriend and that the lucky guy was Leonard Bankhead. For two or three days Mitchell remained numb, dealing with the news and not dealing with it, until he awoke one morning swamped by such raw feelings of diminishment and hopelessness that it was as if his entire self-worth (as well as his dick) had shriveled to the size of a pea. Bankhead’s success with Madeleine revealed the truth about Mitchell. He didn’t have the goods. He hadn’t posted up the numbers. This was where he ranked. Out of contention.
His loss had a monumental effect. Mitchell retreated into obscurity to lick his wounds. His interest in quietism had been present beforehand, and so, with this fresh defeat, there was nothing keeping him from withdrawing within himself completely.
Like Madeleine, Mitchell had started out intending to be an English major. But after reading The Varieties of Religious Experience for a psychology course, he changed his mind. He’d expected the book to be clinical and cold, but it wasn’t. William James described “cases” of all kinds, women and men he’d met or corresponded with, people suffering from melancholia, from nervous maladies, from digestive complaints, people who had yearned for suicide, who’d heard voices and changed their lives overnight. He reported their testimonies without a shred of ridicule. In fact, what