The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [82]
Outside, the crowds were getting even thicker. Mitchell tried his best not to stare out the window but suddenly something caught his eye. It was a woman in a tight dress and black boots.
“Oh, my God!” Claire screamed. “He did it again!”
“I was just looking out the window!”
“You are such a pivot head!”
“What do you want me to do? Wear a blindfold?”
But Claire was happy now. She was ecstatic at her victory over Mitchell, made so obvious by his visible discomfort. Her cheeks flushed with pleasure.
“Your friend hates me,” she said, leaning her head against Larry’s shoulder.
Larry lifted his eyes to Mitchell’s eyes, not unsympathetically. He put his arm around Claire.
Mitchell didn’t begrudge him that. He would have done the same in Larry’s position.
As soon as dinner was over, Mitchell excused himself, saying he felt like taking a walk.
“Don’t be mad at me!” Claire pleaded. “You can look at all the women you want. I promise I won’t say a thing.”
“That’s O.K.,” Mitchell said. “I’m just going back to my hotel.”
“Come by Claire’s tomorrow morning,” Larry said, trying to ease things. “We can go to the Louvre.”
At first, fury alone propelled Mitchell. Claire wasn’t the first college girl to call him out for sexist behavior. It had been happening for years. Mitchell had always assumed that his father’s generation were the bad guys. Those old farts who’d never washed a dish or folded socks—they were the real target of feminist rage. But that had been merely the first assault. Now, in the eighties, arguments about the equitable division of household chores, or the inherent sexism of holding a door open for “a lady,” were old arguments. The movement had become less pragmatic and more theoretical. Male oppression of women wasn’t just a matter of certain deeds but of an entire way of seeing and thinking. College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology’s? But no—anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the “women” Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. Girls were always going on about “male bonding,” too. Anytime two or more guys were having a good time, some girl had to make it sound pathological. What was so great about feminine friendships, Mitchell wanted to know? Maybe they could use a little female bonding.
Fulminating like this, talking under his breath, Mitchell found himself at the Seine. He began crossing one of the bridges—the Pont Neuf. The sun had set and the streetlamps come on. Halfway out, in one of the semicircular seating areas, a group of teenagers had gathered. A guy with pouffy, Jean-Luc Ponty hair was strumming an acoustic guitar while his friends listened, smoking and passing a wine bottle around.
Mitchell watched them as he passed by. Even as a teenager he hadn’t been a teenager like that.
A little farther on, he leaned against the railing and stared down at the dark river. His anger had subsided, replaced by a general displeasure with himself.
It was probably true that he objectified women. He thought about them all the time, didn’t he? He looked at them a lot. And didn’t all this thinking and looking involve their breasts and lips and legs? Female human beings were objects of the most intense interest and scrutiny on Mitchell’s part. And yet he didn’t think that a word like objectification covered the way these alluring—but intelligent!