The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [70]
“I’m dying for coffee,” Larry said.
“I make it with a pression,” Claire said.
“That’s fabulous,” Larry said.
As soon as Claire put down her book and stepped into the kitchen, Mitchell gave Larry a look. “Hi, hon?” he whispered.
Larry looked back at him evenly.
It was painfully clear that, if Mitchell hadn’t been there, Claire wouldn’t be making coffee. If Larry and Claire were alone, they would already be having reunion sex. Under other circumstances, Mitchell would have made himself scarce. But he didn’t know anybody in Paris and had nowhere to go.
He did the next best thing, which was to turn and stare out the window.
Here, momentarily, things improved. The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn’t clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
Turning from the window, Mitchell looked around the apartment again and realized something troubling: there was no place for him to sleep. Come nighttime, Claire and Larry would climb into the only bed together, leaving Mitchell to roll out his sleeping bag on the floor in front of it. They would turn out the lights. As soon as they thought he was asleep, they would begin fooling around, and for the next hour or so, Mitchell would be forced to listen to his friend getting laid five feet away.
He picked up New French Feminisms from the nearby dining table.
The austere cover bore a regiment of names. Julia Kristeva. Hélène Cixous. Kate Millett. Mitchell had seen lots of girls at school reading New French Feminisms, but he’d never seen a guy reading it. Not even Larry, who was small and sensitive and into all things French, had read it.
Suddenly Claire called out excitedly, “I love that book!”
She came out of the kitchen beaming and took it from his hands. “Have you read it?”
“I was just looking at it.”
“I’m reading it for this class I’m taking. I just finished this essay by Kristeva.” She opened the book and flipped through it. Her hair fell in front of her face and she impatiently tossed it back. “I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the body, and how the body has always been associated with the feminine. So it’s interesting that, in Western religion, the body is always seen as sinful. You’re supposed to mortify the body and transcend it. But what Kristeva says is that we have to look at the body again, especially the maternal body. She’s basically a Lacanian, except she doesn’t agree that signification and language come from castration fears. Otherwise we’d all be psychotic.”
Like Larry, Claire was blond, blue-eyed, and Jewish. But whereas Larry had secular parents who didn’t go to temple even on the High Holidays and who held seders in which the afikoman wasn’t a matzoh but a Twinkie (the product of childish mischief years ago, which had now perversely become its own tradition), Claire’s parents were Orthodox Jews who lived by the letter of the law. Their mammoth house in Scarsdale had not two sets of plates in order to keep kosher but two separate kitchens. There were Saturdays when the maid forgot to leave lights on when the Schwartzes dwelt in darkness. Once, Claire’s younger brother had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance (Talmudic wisdom holding that a medical emergency contravened the prohibition against riding in cars on the Sabbath). Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz had refused to ride along with their writhing son, setting off instead, nearly mad with worry, for the hospital on foot.
“The whole thing about Judaism and Christianity,” Claire said, “and just about every