The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [96]
“The flesh is weak,” Mitchell said, grinning at her.
“Go!” Madeleine said, punching him in the chest. “Go to India!”
He was looking at her with his big eyes. He reached out to take her hands. “I love you!” he said. And Madeleine had surprised herself by replying, “I love you, too.” She meant that she loved him but didn’t love love him. That, at least, was one possible interpretation, and, on Bedford Street, at three a.m., Madeleine decided not to clear up the matter further. Kissing Mitchell once more, briefly and dryly, she hailed a cab and made her escape.
The next morning, when Kelly asked her what had happened with Mitchell, Madeleine had lied.
“Nothing.”
“I think he’s cute,” Kelly said. “He’s better-looking than I remember.”
“You think?”
“He’s sort of my type.”
Hearing this, Madeleine received another surprise: she felt jealous. Apparently, she wanted to keep Mitchell for herself, even while denying him. There was no end to her selfishness.
“He’s probably on the plane by now,” she said, and left it at that.
On the train back to Rhode Island, Madeleine began to suffer pangs of remorse. She decided that she had to tell Leonard what had happened, but by the time the train reached Providence, she realized that this would only make things worse. Leonard would think that he was losing her because of his illness. He would feel sexually inadequate, and he wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. Mitchell was gone, out of the country, and soon Madeleine and Leonard would be moving to Pilgrim Lake. With that in mind, Madeleine refrained from confessing. She threw herself back into the task of loving and caring for Leonard, and after a while the experience of kissing Mitchell that night began to seem as though it had taken place in an alternate reality, dreamlike and ephemeral.
Now, over the bay from Boston, picking its way among small cottony clouds, the ten-seater commuter plane appeared in the Cape Cod sky, descending toward the peninsula. Among the other greeters Madeleine watched the plane land and taxi along the runway, the force of its propellers flattening the dune grass on either side.
Ground personnel rolled a metal stairway up to the plane’s front door, which opened from inside, and passengers began disembarking.
Madeleine knew that her sister’s marriage was in trouble. She knew that her job today was to be helpful and understanding. But as Phyllida and Alwyn emerged from the plane Madeleine couldn’t help wishing that she was waving not hello but goodbye. She had hoped to delay any parental visit until Leonard’s side effects had subsided, which all his doctors insisted would be the case soon. It wasn’t so much that Madeleine was ashamed of Leonard, but that she was disappointed at having Phyllida see him in his present state. Leonard wasn’t himself. Phyllida was bound to get the wrong impression. Madeleine wanted her mother to meet the real Leonard, the boy she’d fallen in love with, who would be showing up any day now.
On top of this, seeing Alwyn was likely to be unpleasant. In the days when her big sister had sent her the Bachelorette’s Survival Kit, back when Alwyn had been in step with the sixties and the birthright that came with them to denounce whatever she didn’t like and to respond to whatever whim she pleased—dropping out of college, for instance, after her first year to drive around the country on the back of her boyfriend Grimm’s motorcycle, or having a surprisingly cute pet white rat named Hendrix, or apprenticing to a candlemaker who insisted on following ancient Celtic methods—Alwyn had seemed to be blazing a trail of antimaterialistic, morally engaged creativity. But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister’s iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she’d voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same