The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [81]
“Gay Paree,” Larry said, filling a glass for Mitchell.
After a few more minutes, Claire went to the bathroom to wash up for dinner. As soon as she shut the door behind her, Mitchell leaned toward Larry. “O.K., we’ve seen Paris. Now let’s go.”
“Very funny, Mitchell.”
“You said we’d have a place to stay.”
“We do have a place.”
“You do.”
Larry lowered his voice. “I’m not going to see Claire for six months, maybe more. What can I do? Stay here one night and then split?”
“Good idea.”
Larry gazed up at Mitchell. “You look really pale,” he said.
“That’s because I haven’t eaten all day. And you know why I haven’t eaten? Because I spent forty dollars on a room!”
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“This was not the plan,” Mitchell said.
“The plan was to have no plans.”
“Except that you’ve got a plan. Getting laid.”
“And you wouldn’t?”
“Of course I would.”
“So there you go.”
The two friends faced each other, neither giving way.
“Three days and we’re out of here,” Mitchell said.
Claire came out of the bathroom, holding a hairbrush. She bent over so that her long tresses fell forward, nearly touching the ground. For a full thirty seconds she combed her mane with downward strokes before snapping up and flinging her hair behind her, smooth and puffed out.
She asked where they wanted to eat.
Larry was putting on his unisex tennies. “How about couscous?” Larry said. “Mitchell, have you ever had couscous?”
“No.”
“Oh, you have got to have couscous.”
Claire made a wry face. “Whenever somebody comes to Paris,” she said, “they have to go to the Latin Quarter and have couscous. Couscous in the Latin Quarter is so encoded!”
“You want to go somewhere else?” Larry said.
“No,” Claire said. “Let’s be unoriginal.”
When they got down to the street, Larry put his arm around Claire, whispering in her ear. Mitchell followed behind.
They zigzagged across the city, in evening’s flattering light. Parisians looked good already; now they looked even better.
The restaurant Claire took them to, in the Latin Quarter’s narrow streets, was small and hectic, the walls covered in Moroccan tiles. Mitchell sat facing the window, watching the people streaming past outside. At one point, a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a Joan of Arc haircut, passed right in front of the glass. When Mitchell looked at her, the girl did an amazing thing: she looked back. She met his gaze with frank sexual meaning. Not that she wanted to have sex with him, necessarily. Only that she was happy to acknowledge, on this late-summer evening, that he was a man and she a woman, and if he found her attractive, that was all right with her. No American girl had ever looked at Mitchell like that.
Deanie was right: Europe was a nice spot.
Mitchell kept his eyes on the woman until she had disappeared. When he turned back to the table, Claire was staring at him, shaking her head.
“Pivot head,” she said.
“What?”
“On the way over here you checked out every single woman we passed.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Foreign country,” Mitchell said, trying to make light of it. “I’m taking an anthropological interest.”
“So you see women as some tribe you have to study?”
“You’re in for it now, Mitchell,” Larry said. He was obviously going to be of no help whatsoever.
Claire was looking at Mitchell with undisguised contempt. “Do you always objectify women or just when you’re traveling in Europe?”
“Just looking at women doesn’t mean I objectify them.”
“What are you doing to them, then?”
“Looking at them.”
“Because you want to fuck them.”
This was, more or less, true. Suddenly, in the castigating light of Claire’s gaze, Mitchell was ashamed of himself. He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he’d been a naughty boy.
In response to this shame, Mitchell did another guy thing. He went silent. After they ordered, and the wine and food arrived, he concentrated on eating