She was dressed in a Lawrenceville T-shirt and nothing else. Her upper thighs, level with Mitchell’s head as she entered, were a little fuller than he’d expected.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
When she asked what he was reading, Mitchell had to look to remember the title. He was wonderfully and fearfully aware of his nakedness beneath the thin bedsheet. He felt that Madeleine was aware of this, too. He thought about kissing her. For a moment he thought that Madeleine might kiss him. And then, because Madeleine didn’t, because he was a house guest and her parents were sleeping downstairs, because, in that glorious moment, Mitchell felt that the tide had turned and he had all the time in the world to make his move, he did nothing. Finally, Madeleine got up, looking vaguely disappointed. She descended the stairs and switched off the light.
After she was gone, Mitchell replayed the scene in his mind, seeking a different outcome. Worried about soiling the bedding, he headed for the bathroom, bumping into an old box spring, which fell over with a clatter. When all was quiet again, he continued to the bathroom. In the tiny attic sink, he shot his load, turning on the tap to rinse away the least curd of evidence.
The next morning, they took the train back to Providence, walked together up College Hill, hugged, and parted. A few days later, Mitchell stopped by Madeleine’s room. She wasn’t there. On her message board was a note from someone named Billy: “Tarkovsky screening 7:30 Sayles. Be there or be .” Mitchell left an unsigned quotation, a bit from the Gerty MacDowell section of Ulysses: “Then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads …”
A week went by and he didn’t hear from Madeleine. When he called he got no answer.
He went back to her dorm. Again she was out. On her message board someone had drawn an arrow pointing to his Joyce quotation along with the note “Who’s the perv?”
Mitchell erased this. He wrote, “Maddy, give me a call. Mitchell.” Then he erased this and wrote, “Permit a colloquy. M.”
Back in his own room, Mitchell examined himself in the mirror. He turned sideways, trying to see his profile. He pretended to be talking to someone at a party to see what he was really like.
After another week passed without his hearing from Madeleine, Mitchell stopped calling or dropping by her room. He became fierce about his studies, spending heroic amounts of time ornamenting his English papers, or translating Vergil’s extended metaphors about vineyards and women. When he finally did run into Madeleine again, she was just as friendly as always. For the rest of the year they continued to be close, going to poetry readings together and occasionally eating dinner in the Ratty, alone or with other people. When Madeleine’s parents visited in the spring, she invited Mitchell to have dinner with them at the Bluepoint Grill. But he never went back to the house in Prettybrook, never built a fire in their hearth, or drank a G & T on the deck overlooking the garden. Little by little, Mitchell managed to forge his own social life at school and, though they continued to be friends, Madeleine drifted off into hers. He never forgot his premonition, however. One night the following October, almost a year from the time he’d gone to Prettybrook, Mitchell saw Madeleine crossing campus in the purple twilight. She was with a curly-headed blond guy named Billy Bainbridge, whom Mitchell knew from his freshman hall. Billy took women’s studies courses and referred to himself as a feminist. Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine’s jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
•
In Plato’s Phaedrus, the speeches of Lysias the Sophist and of the early Socrates (before the latter makes his recantation) rest on this principle: that the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved.
In the weeks after breaking up with Leonard, Madeleine spent most of her time at the Narragansett, lying on her bed. She dragged herself to her final classes. She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance in the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread—the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue—before she’d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.
She expected Leonard to call. She fantasized about him appearing at her front door, asking her to come back. When he didn’t, she became desperate and dialed his number. The line was often busy. Leonard was functioning just fine without her. He was calling people, other girls, probably. Sometimes Madeleine listened to the busy signal so long she found herself trying to hear Leonard’s voice beneath it, as if he was just on the other side of the noise. If she heard his phone ring, the thought that Leonard might answer it at any second made Madeleine exhilarated, but then she panicked and slammed down the receiver, always thinking that she heard his voice say “Hello” at the last moment. In between calls, she lay on her side, thinking about calling.
Love had made her intolerable. It had made her heavy. Sprawled on her bed, keeping her shoes from touching the sheets (Madeleine remained fastidious despite her misery), she reviewed all the things she’d done to drive Leonard away. She’d been too needy, crawling up into his lap like a little girl, wanting to be with him all the time. She’d lost track of her own priorities and had become a drag.
Only one thing remained from her relationship with Leonard: the book she’d thrown at his head. Before storming out of Leonard’s apartment that day—and while he lay in lordly nakedness on the bed, calmly repeating her name with the suggestion that she was overreacting—Madeleine had noticed the book lying open on the floor like a bird that had knocked itself out against a windowpane. To pick it up would prove Leonard’s point: that she had an unhealthy obsession with A Lover’s Discourse; that, contrary to dispelling her fantasies about love, the book had served to reinforce those fantasies; and that, in evidence of all this, she wasn’t only a sentimentalist but a lousy literary critic besides.
On the other hand, to leave A Lover’s Discourse on the floor—where Leonard could later pick it up and inspect the passages she’d highlighted, as well as her marginal notes (including, on page 123, in a chapter titled “In the Loving Calm of Your Arms,” a single, exclamatory “Leonard!”)—wasn’t possible. So, after gathering up her bag, Madeleine in one fluid motion had snatched up the Barthes as well, not daring to check if Leonard had noticed. Five seconds later she’d slammed the door behind her.
She was glad she’d taken the book. Now, in her morose condition, the elegant prose of Roland Barthes was her one consolation. Breaking up with Leonard hadn’t lessened the relevance of A Lover’s Discourse one bit. There were more chapters about heartbreak than happiness, in fact. One chapter was called “Dependency.” Another, “Suicide.” Still another, “In Praise of Tears.” The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry … The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?
Good question. Since breaking up with Leonard, Madeleine had been crying more or less all the time. She cried herself to sleep at night. She cried in the morning, brushing her teeth. She tried very hard not to cry in front of her roommates and for the most part succeeded.
A Lover’s Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Madeleine knew all that. The problem was, it didn’t work. She could read B
arthes’ deconstructions of love all day without feeling her love for Leonard diminish the teeniest little bit. The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page. She identified with Barthes’ shadowy “I.” She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed. Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it!
In the world outside, the semester, and thus college itself, was quickly speeding toward its end. Her roommates, art history majors both, had already found entry-level positions in New York, Olivia at Sotheby’s, Abby at a gallery in Soho. A startling number of her friends and acquaintances were doing campus interviews with investment banks. Others had gotten scholarships or fellowships or were moving to L.A. to work in television.
The most Madeleine could muster in the way of preparing for the future was to peel herself out of bed once a day to check her P.O. box. In April, she’d been too distracted by work and love to notice that the fifteenth came and went without a letter from Yale arriving. By the time she did notice, she was too depressed about her breakup to bear another rejection. For two weeks, Madeleine didn’t even go to the post office. Finally, when she forced herself to go and empty her overstuffed mailbox, there was still no letter from Yale.
There was news, however, about her other applications. The ESL organization sent her a gushing acceptance letter (“Congratulations, Madeleine!”) along with a teacher enrollment form and the name of the Chinese province, Shandong, where she would be teaching. There was also an information packet containing various bold-faced sentences that leapt out at her:
Sanitation facilities (showers, toilets, etc.) may take some getting used to, but the majority of our teachers come to enjoy “roughing it.”
The Chinese diet is quite varied, especially as compared to American standards. Don’t be surprised if, after a few months in your host village, you find yourself eating snake with pleasure!
She didn’t return the enrollment form.
Two days later, she received a rejection letter through campus mail from the Melvin and Hetty Greenberg Foundation informing her that she would not be receiving the Greenberg fellowship to study Hebrew in Jerusalem.
Back at her apartment, Madeleine confronted the cluster of shipping boxes. A week before they’d broken up, Leonard had received positive word from Pilgrim Lake Laboratory. In what had seemed a significant gesture at the time, he’d suggested that they live together in the free apartment that came with his fellowship. If Madeleine got into Yale, she could come up on weekends; if she didn’t, she could live at Pilgrim Lake over the winter, and reapply. In short order, Madeleine had canceled her other plans and had begun packing boxes of books and clothes to ship to the lab ahead of their arrival. Since Madeleine had been questioning the intensity of Leonard’s feelings for her, his invitation to live together made her blissful, and this, in turn, had played a strong part in Madeleine’s avowal of love a few days later. And now, as a cruel reminder of that disaster, the boxes were sitting in her room, going nowhere.
Madeleine ripped off the address labels and shoved the boxes into the corner.
Somehow, she turned in her honors thesis. She handed in her final paper for Semiotics 211 but failed to pick it up after the exam period to see Zipperstein’s comments and her grade.
By the time graduation weekend rolled around, Madeleine was doing her best to ignore it. Abby and Olivia had tried to get her to go to Campus Dance, but the thunderstorms that rolled through town, bringing winds that blew over cocktail tables and ripped down the strings of colored lanterns, caused the festivities to be moved inside to some gym, and nobody they knew went. Needing to occupy their families, Abby and Olivia had persisted in going to the clambake with President Swearer on Saturday afternoon, but after a half hour they sent their parents back to their hotel. On Sunday, all three roommates skipped the Baccalaureate ceremony at First Baptist Church. By nine o’clock that night, Madeleine was in her bedroom, curled up with A Lover’s Discourse, not reading it, just keeping it nearby.
It wasn’t clean-sheet day. It hadn’t been clean-sheet day for a long time.
There was a knock at her bedroom door.
“Just a sec.” Madeleine’s voice was raspy from crying. She had mucus in her throat. “Come in,” she said.
The door opened to reveal Abby and Olivia, shoulder-to-shoulder, like a delegation.
Abby came quickly forward and snatched the Roland Barthes away.
“We’re confiscating this,” she said.
“Give it back.”
“You’re not reading that book,” Olivia said. “You’re wallowing in it.”
“I just wrote a paper on it. I was checking something.”
Abby held the book behind her and shook her head. “You can’t just lie around moping. This weekend’s been a total bummer. But there’s a party tonight at Lollie and Pookie’s and you have to come. Come on!”
Abby and Olivia thought it was the romantic in Madeleine who wept. They thought she was delusional, ridiculous. She would have felt the same, if it had been one of them, pining away. Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.
“Give me my book,” she said.
“I’ll give it back if you come to the party.”
Madeleine understood why her roommates trivialized her feelings. They’d never been in love, not really. They didn’t know what she was dealing with.
“We’re graduating tomorrow!” Olivia pleaded. “This is our last night at college. You can’t stay in your room!”
Madeleine looked away and rubbed her face. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Ten.”
“I haven’t showered.”
“We’ll wait.”
“I don’t have anything to wear.”
“You can borrow a dress from me,” Olivia said.
They stood there, obliging and pestering all at once.
“Give me the book,” Madeleine said.
“Only if you come.”
“O.K.!” Madeleine relented. “I’ll come.”
Reluctantly, Abby handed Madeleine the paperback.
Madeleine stared at the cover. “What if Leonard’s there?” she asked.
“He won’t be,” Abby said.
“What if he is?”
Abby looked away and repeated, “Trust me. He won’t.”
Lollie and Pookie Ames lived in a ramshackle house on Lloyd Avenue. As Madeleine and her roommates approached along the sidewalk, under the dripping elms, they could hear throbbing bass and alcohol-loosened voices coming from inside. Candles flickered behind the steamed-up windows.
They stashed their umbrellas behind the bikes on the porch and entered the front door. Inside, the air was warm and moist, like a beer-scented rain forest. The flea-market furniture had been pushed against the walls so that people could dance. Jeff Trombley, who was DJ-ing, was using a flashlight to see the turntable, the beam spilling onto a poster of Sandino on the wall behind him.
“You guys go first,” Madeleine said. “Tell me if you see Leonard.”
Abby looked annoyed. “I told you, he won’t be here.”
“He might.”
“Why would he be? He doesn’t like people. Look, I’m sorry, but now that you’re broken up, I have to say it. Leonard’s not exactly normal. He’s weird.”
“He is not,” Madeleine objected.
“Will you please just get over him? Will you at least try?”
Olivia lit a cigarette and said, “God, if I worried about running into old boyfriends, I couldn’t go anywhere!”
“O.K., forget it,” Madeleine said. “Let’s go in.”
“Finally!” Abby said. “Come on. Let’s have fun tonight. It’s our last night.”
Despite the loud music, not many people were dancing. Tony Perotti, in a Plasmatics T-shirt, was pogoing, all alone, in the middle of the floor. Debbie Boonstock, C
arrie Mox, and Stacy Henkel were dancing in a ring around Marc Wheeland. Wheeland was wearing a white T-shirt and baggy shorts. His calves were massive. So were his shoulders. As the three girls pranced in front of him, Wheeland stared at the floor, stomping around and, every so often (this was the dancing part), minimally lifting his muscle-bound arms.
“How long before Marc Wheeland takes off his shirt?” Abby said as they headed down the hall.
“Like two minutes,” Olivia said.
The kitchen resembled something in a submarine movie, dark, narrow, with pipes snaking overhead and a wet floor. Madeleine stepped on bottle caps as she squeezed through the throng of people.
They attained the open space at the kitchen’s far end only to realize it was unoccupied due to the presence of a reeking litter box.
“Gross!” Olivia said.
“Don’t they ever clean that thing?” Abby said.
A guy in a baseball hat was standing proprietarily in front of the refrigerator. When Abby opened it, he informed them, “The Grolsch are mine.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t take the Grolsch. They’re mine.”
“I thought this was a party,” Abby said.
“Yeah, it is,” the guy said. “But everyone always brings domestic beer. I brought imported.”
Olivia rose to full Scandinavian height to cast him a withering look. “As if we even wanted beer,” she said.
She bent to look into the refrigerator herself and said with distaste, “God, it’s all beer.”
Standing up again, she looked commandingly around the room until she saw Pookie Ames, and called to her over the noise.
Pookie, who normally had an afghan scarf wrapped around her head, tonight had on a black velvet dress and diamond earrings, in which she looked absolutely at home. “Pookie, save us,” Olivia said. “We can’t drink beer.”