The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [68]
This, too, was the cheapest option. Therefore, inarguable.
As Mitchell fiddled with the belt of his backpack, his fever spiked a half degree.
“I’m not sure if I’m getting the cholera or the typhus,” he said to Larry.
“Probably both.”
Aside from the romantic opportunities, Paris appealed to Larry because he was a Francophile. He’d spent a summer during high school working at a restaurant in Normandy, learning to speak the language and to chop vegetables. At college, his proficiency in French had won him a room in French House. The plays Larry directed at Production Workshop, the student-run theater, were inevitably by French Modernist playwrights. Since coming east to college, Mitchell had been trying to wash the Midwest off himself. Sitting around in Larry’s room, drinking the muddy espresso Larry made and hearing him talk about “the theater of the absurd,” seemed like a good way to start. With his black turtleneck and little white Keds, Larry looked like he’d just returned not from a history lecture but from the Actors Studio. He already had full-blown adult addictions to caffeine and foie gras. Unlike Mitchell’s parents, whose artistic enthusiasms ran to Ethel Merman and Andrew Wyeth, Larry’s parents, Harvey and Moira Pleshette, were devotees of high culture. Moira ran the Wave Hill visual arts program. Harvey served on the boards of the New York City Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. During the Cold War, Irina Kolnoskova, second ballerina of the Kirov Ballet, had stayed in hiding at the Pleshettes’ house, in Riverdale, after defecting. Larry, only fifteen at the time, had ferried champagne splits and graham crackers to the ballerina’s bedside, where Kolnoskova alternately wept, watched game shows, or coaxed him to massage her young, spectacularly deformed feet. For Mitchell, Larry’s stories of drunken cast parties held at their house, of stumbling on Leonard Bernstein making out with a male dancer in the upstairs hallway, or of Ben Vereen singing a song from Pippin at Larry’s older sister’s wedding, were as astounding as tales of meeting Joe Montana or Larry Bird would have been for another kind of boy. The Pleshettes’ refrigerator was the first place Mitchell had encountered gourmet ice cream. He still remembered the thrill of it: coming down to the kitchen one morning, the majestic Hudson visible in the window, and opening the freezer to see the small round tub of exotically named ice cream. Not a greedy half gallon, as they had at Mitchell’s house in Michigan, not cheap ice milk, not vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry but a flavor he had never dreamed of before, with a name as lyrical as the Berryman poems he was reading for his American poetry class: rum raisin. Ice cream that was also a drink! In a precious pint-size container. Six of these lined up next to six bags of dark French roast Zabar’s coffee. What was Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me, Mitchell’s face silently pleaded throughout his visits. He was in New York, the greatest city in the world. He wanted to learn everything, and Larry was the guy who could teach him.
Moira never paid her parking tickets, just stashed them in the glove box. When Harvey found out, he shouted at the dinner table, “That’s fiscal irresponsibility!” The Pleshettes attended family therapy sessions, all six of them going weekly to a shrink in Manhattan to hash out their conflicts. Like Mitchell’s father, Harvey had served in World War II. He dressed in khaki suits and bow ties, smoked Dominican cigars, and was in every way a member of that superconfident, supermature generation that went to war. And yet once a week Harvey lay on a