The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [69]
At the end of the war, Harvey had been stationed in Paris with the U.S. Army. It was a time he liked to talk about, his exuberant recollections of les femmes parisiennes often causing Moira’s expression to grow pinched. “I was twenty-two and a lieutenant in the American army. We had the run of the place. We’d liberated Paris and it was ours! I had my own driver. We used to motor along the avenues handing out stockings and chocolate bars. That was all it took.” Every four or five years, the Pleshettes went back to France to tour the paternal war sites. In a sense, by coming to Paris now at the same age, Larry was reenacting his father’s youth, back when the Americans had marched into the city.
That was no longer the case. There was nothing American about the avenue they were trudging along. Up ahead, a billboard advertised a film called Beau-père, the poster showing a teenage girl, topless, in her father’s lap. Larry walked by without noticing.
It would be years before Mitchell developed an understanding of the layout of Paris, years before he could deploy the word arrondissement, much less learn that the numbered districts were laid out in a spiral. He was used to grid cities. That the First Arrondissement might rub up against the Thirteenth, without the Fourth or Fifth getting in between, would have been inconceivable to him.
Claire lived not far from the Eiffel Tower, however, and, later on, Mitchell would calculate that her apartment had been in the fashionable Seventh, and that it must have been expensive.
Her street, when they managed to find it, was a cobblestone relic of medieval Paris. The sidewalk was too narrow to navigate with their packs, so they had to walk in the street, past the toy cars.
The name on the bell was “Thierry.” Larry pressed it. After a long delay, the lock buzzed. Mitchell, who’d been resting against the door, tumbled into the lobby as it opened.
“Walk much?” Larry said.
Back on his feet, Mitchell stood aside to let Larry enter, then hip-checked him back down the front steps, and went in first.
“Fuck you, Mitchell,” Larry said in a tone almost of affection.
Like snails hauling their shells, they slowly ascended the staircase. It got darker the higher they climbed. On the sixth floor they waited in near-total blackness until a door at one end opened and Claire Schwartz stepped into the frame of light.
She was holding a book, her expression more that of a library patron who’d been momentarily distracted than that of a girl eagerly awaiting her boyfriend’s arrival from across the sea. Her long honey-colored hair was hanging down in front of her face, but she ran her hand through it, tucking a portion behind her right ear. This seemed to make her face once again available for emotion. She smiled and cried out, “Hi, hon!”
“Hi, hon,” Larry responded, hurrying to her.
Claire was three inches taller than Larry. She bent her knees while they embraced. Mitchell hung back in the shadows until they were finished.
Finally, Claire noticed him and said, “Oh, hi. Come on in.”
Claire was two years younger than they were, still a junior in college. Larry had met her at a summer theater workshop at SUNY Purchase—he was doing theater, she was studying French—and this was the first time that Mitchell had met her. She was wearing a peasant blouse, blue jeans, and long multiform earrings that resembled miniature wind chimes. Her rainbow-colored socks had individual toes. The book she was holding was called New French Feminisms.
Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels. The apartment she was subletting wasn’t the usual chambre de bonne, with a fold-down bed and a shared WC in the hall, of a visiting