“The Culler was passable at best,” Thurston said.
“What didn’t you like about it?” the professor asked him.
Thurston had his knee up against the edge of the seminar table. He pushed his chair up on its back legs, scrunching up his face. “It’s readable and everything,” he said. “And well argued and all that. But it’s just a question of whether you can use a discredited discourse—like, say, reason—to explicate something as paradigmatically revolutionary as deconstruction.”
Madeleine searched along the table for mutual eye-rolling but the other students seemed eager to hear what Thurston had to say.
“Care to elaborate?” Zipperstein said.
“Well, what I mean is, first off, reason is just a discourse like any other, right? It’s only been imbued with a sense of absolute truth because it’s the privileged discourse of the West. What Derrida’s saying is that you have to use reason because, you know, reason is all there is. But at the same time you have to be aware that language is by its very nature unreasonable. You have to reason yourself out of reasonableness.” He pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt and scratched his bony shoulder. “Culler, on the other hand, is still operating in the old mode. Mono as opposed to stereo. So from that point of view, I found the book, yeah, a little bit disappointing.”
A silence ensued. And deepened.
“I don’t know,” Madeleine said, glancing at Leonard for support. “Maybe it’s just me, but wasn’t it a relief to read a logical argument for once? Culler boils down everything Eco and Derrida are saying into a digestible form.”
Thurston turned his head slowly to gaze across the seminar table at her. “I’m not saying it’s bad,” he said. “It’s fine. But Culler’s work is of a different order than Derrida. Every genius needs an explainer. That’s what Culler is for Derrida.”
Madeleine shrugged this off. “I got a lot better idea of what deconstruction is from reading Culler than from reading Derrida.”
Thurston took pains to give her point of view full consideration. “It’s the nature of a simplification to be simple,” he said.
Class ended shortly after that, leaving Madeleine fuming. As she was coming out of Sayles Hall, she saw Leonard standing on the steps, holding a Coke can. She went right up to him and said, “Thanks for the help.”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought you were on my side. Why didn’t you say anything in class?”
“First Law of Thermodynamics,” Leonard said. “Conservation of energy.”
“Didn’t you agree with me?”
“I did and I didn’t,” Leonard said.
“You didn’t like the Culler?”
“The Culler’s good. But Derrida’s a heavyweight. You can’t just write him off.”
Madeleine looked dubious, but Derrida wasn’t who she was mad at. “Considering how Thurston’s always going on about how much he worships language, you’d think he wouldn’t parrot so much jargon. He used the word phallus three times today.”
Leonard smiled. “Figures if he says it it’ll be like having one.”
“He drives me crazy.”
“You want to get some coffee?”
“And fascist. That’s another of his favorites. You know the dry cleaners on Thayer Street? He called them fascist.”
“Must have gone extra heavy on the starch.”
“Yes,” Madeleine said.
“Yes, what?”
“You just invited me for coffee.”
“I did?” Leonard said. “Yes, I did. O.K. Let’s go get coffee.”
Leonard didn’t want to go to the Blue Room. He said he didn’t like to be around college students. They headed through Wayland Arch up to Hope Street, in the direction of Fox Point.
As they walked, Leonard spat into his Coke can every so often. “Pardon my disgusting habit,” he said.
Madeleine wrinkled up her nose. “Are you going to keep doing that?”
“No,” Leonard said. “I don’t even know why I do it. It’s just something I picked up from my rodeo days.”
At the next trash can they came to, he tossed the Coke and spat out his wad of tobacco.
Within a few blocks pretty campus plantings of tulip and daffodil gave way to treeless streets lined by working-class houses painted in cheerful hues. They passed a Portuguese bakery and a Portuguese fish store selling sardines and cuttlefish. The kids here had no yards to play in but seemed happy enough, wheeling back and forth along the blank sidewalks. Nearer the highway, there were a few warehouses and, on the corner of Wickenden, a local diner.
Leonard wanted to sit at the counter. “I need to be close to the pies,” he said. “I need to see which one is talking to me.”
As Madeleine took a stool next to him, Leonard stared at the dessert case.
“Do you remember when they used to serve slices of cheese with apple pie?” he asked.
“Vaguely,” Madeleine said.
“They don’t seem to do that anymore. You and I are probably the only two people in this place who remember it.”
“Actually, I don’t remember it,” Madeleine said.
“You don’t? Never had a little slice of Wisconsin cheddar with your apple pie? I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Maybe they’ll put a slice of cheese on a piece if you ask them.”
“I didn’t say I liked it. I’m just mourning its passage.”
The conversation lapsed. And suddenly, to her surprise, Madeleine was flooded with panic. She felt the silence like a judgment against her. At the same time, her anxiety about the silence made it even harder to speak.
Though it didn’t feel nice to be so nervous, it did feel nice, in a way. It had been a while since Madeleine had been that way around a guy.
The waitress was down at the end of the counter talking to another customer.
“So why are you taking Zipperstein’s class?” she asked.
“Philosophical interest,” Leonard said. “Literally. Philosophy’s all about theory of language right now. It’s all linguistics. So I figured I’d check it out.”
“Aren’t you a biology major, too?”
“That’s what I really am,” Leonard said. “The philosophy’s just a sideline.”
Madeleine realized that she’d never dated a science major. “Do you want to be a doctor?”
“Right now all I want to do is get the waitress’s attention.”
Leonard waved his arm a few times to no avail. Suddenly he said, “Is it hot in here?” Without waiting for an answer, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a blue bandanna, which he proceeded to put over his head, tying it in back and making a number of small, precise adjustments until he was satisfied. Madeleine watched this with a slight feeling of disappointment. She associated bandannas with hacky sack, the Grateful Dead, and alfalfa sprouts, all of which she could do without. Still, she was impressed with Leonard’s sheer size on the stool next to her. His largeness, coupled with the softness—the delicacy, almost—of his voice, gave Madeleine a strange fairytale feeling, as if she were a princess sitting beside a gentle giant.
“The thing is, though,” Leonard said, still staring in the waitress’s direction, “I didn’t get interested in philosophy because of linguistics. I got interested for the eternal verities. To learn how to die, et cetera. Now it’s more like, ‘What do we mean when we say we die?’ ‘What do we mean we mean when we say we die?’”
Finally, the waitress came over. Madeleine ordered the cottage cheese plate and coffee. Leonard ordered apple pie and coffee. When the waitress left, he spun his stool rightward, so that their knees briefly touched.
“How very female of you,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Cottage cheese.”
“I like cottage cheese.”
“Are you on a diet? You don’t look like someone on a diet.”
“Why do you want to know?” Madeleine said.
And here, for the first time, Leonard appeared rattle
d. Beneath the line of the bandanna, his face colored, and he spun away, breaking eye contact. “Just curious,” he said.
In the next second, he spun back, resuming the previous conversation. “Derrida’s supposed to be a lot clearer in French,” he said. “Rumor has it his prose in French is limpid.”
“Maybe I should read it in French, then.”
“You know French?” Leonard said, sounding impressed.
“I’m not great. I can read Flaubert.”
It was then that Madeleine made a big mistake. Things were going so well with Leonard, the mood was so promising—even the weather lending a hand because, after they finished their food and left the diner, walking back to campus, a March drizzle forced them to share Madeleine’s collapsible umbrella—that a feeling came over her like those she’d had as a girl when treated to a pastry or a dessert, a happiness so fraught by an awareness of its brevity that she took the tiniest bites, making the cream puff or éclair last as long as possible. In this same way, instead of seeing where the afternoon led, Madeleine decided to check its progress, to save some for later, and she told Leonard she had to go home and study.
They didn’t kiss goodbye. They didn’t come close to it. Leonard, hunching under the umbrella, abruptly said “Bye” and hurried off through the rain, keeping his head down. Madeleine went back to the Narragansett. She lay down on her bed, and didn’t move for a long time.
The days dragged until the next meeting of Sem 211. Madeleine arrived early, choosing a seat at the seminar table next to Leonard’s usual spot. But when he showed up, ten minutes late, he took an available chair next to the professor. He didn’t say anything in class or glance in Madeleine’s direction even once. His face looked swollen and there was a line of blemishes running down one cheek. When the class ended, Leonard was the first one out the door.
The next week he missed class entirely.
And so Madeleine was left to contend with semiotics, and with Zipperstein and his disciples, all by herself.
By now they had moved on to Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The Derrida went like this: “In that sense, it is the Aufhebung of other writings, particularly of hieroglyphic script and of the Leibnizian characteristic that had been criticized previously through one and the same gesture.” In poetic moods, the Derrida went like this: “What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis.”
Since Derrida claimed that language, by its very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote, Madeleine wondered how Derrida expected her to get his meaning. Maybe he didn’t. That was why he deployed so much arcane terminology, so many loop-de-looping clauses. That was why he said what he said in sentences it took a minute to identify the subjects of. (Could “the access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality” really be a subject?)
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something—anything, The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.
Then, too, there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
The next Thursday, Madeleine came to class wearing a Norwegian sweater with a snowflake design. She’d gone back to her glasses. For the second week in a row, Leonard didn’t show up. Madeleine worried that he’d dropped the class, but it was too late in the semester to do that. Zipperstein said, “Has anybody seen Mr. Bankhead? Is he sick?” Nobody knew. Thurston arrived with a girl named Cassandra Hart, both of them sniffly and heroin-pale. Taking out a black Flair pen, Thurston wrote on Cassandra’s bare shoulder, “Not Real Skin.”
Zipperstein was in a lively mood. He’d just returned from a conference in New York, dressed differently than usual. Listening to him talk about the paper he’d given at the New School, Madeleine suddenly understood. Semiotics was the form Zipperstein’s midlife crisis had taken. Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his classes. Instead of leaving his wife, Zipperstein had left the English department. Instead of buying a sports car, he’d bought deconstruction.
He sat at the seminar table now and started speaking:
“I hope you read the Semiotext(e) for this week. Apropos of Lyotard, and in homage to Gertrude Stein, let me suggest the following: the thing about desire is that there is no there there.”
That was it. That was Zipperstein’s prompt. He sat before them, blinking, waiting for somebody to reply. He appeared to have all the patience in the world.
Madeleine had wanted to know what semiotics was. She’d wanted to know what the fuss was about. Well, now she felt she knew.
But then, in Week Ten, for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense.
It was a Friday night in April, just past eleven, and Madeleine was in bed, reading. The assigned text for that week was Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. For a book purportedly about love, it didn’t look very romantic. The cover was a somber chocolate brown, the title turquoise. There was no author photograph and only a sketchy bio, listing Barthes’ other works.
Madeleine had the book in her lap. With her right hand she was eating peanut butter straight from the jar. The spoon fit perfectly against the curve of her upper palate, allowing the peanut butter to dissolve creamily against her tongue.
Opening to the introduction, she began to read:
The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.
Outside, the temperature, which had remained cold through March, had shot up into the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks puddling, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.
Madeleine had her windows open on the liquid darkness. She sucked the spoon and read on:
What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others: around the figure, the players pass the handkerchief which sometimes, by a final parenthesis, is held a second longer before handing it on. (Ideally, the book would be a cooperative: “To the United Readers and Lovers.”)
It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’ made immediate sense. It wasn’t only the relief at recognizing that here, finally, was a book she might write her final paper on. What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.
It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.
In recent days, from her solitude, Madeleine had sent out feelers. She talked about Semiotics 211 with her roommates, mentioning Thurston, Cassandra, and Leonard. It turned out that Abby knew Leonard from her freshman year.
“What was he like?” Madeleine asked.
“
Sort of intense. Really smart, but intense. He used to call me all the time. Like every day.”
“Did he like you?”
“No, he just wanted to talk. He’d keep me on the phone for an hour.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
“Everything! His relationship. My relationship. His parents, my parents. Jimmy Carter getting attacked by that swamp rabbit, which he was obsessed about. He’d go on and on.”
“Who was he going out with?”
“Some girl named Mindy. But then they broke up. That’s when he really started calling me. He’d call like six times a day. He was always going on about how good Mindy smelled. She had this smell that was supposedly perfectly compatible to Leonard, chemically. He was worried no girl would ever smell right to him again. I told him it was probably her moisturizer. He said no, it was her skin. It was chemically perfect. That’s what he’s like.” She paused and gave Madeleine a searching look. “Why are you asking? Do you like him?”
“I just know him from class,” Madeleine said.
“Do you want me to invite him for dinner?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll invite him to dinner,” Abby said.
The dinner had been on Tuesday night, three days ago. Leonard had come politely bearing a gift, a set of dish towels. He’d dressed up, wearing a white shirt with a skinny necktie, his long hair gathered in a masculine ponytail like a Scottish warrior. He was touchingly sincere, saying hello to Abby, handing her the wrapped gift and thanking her for the invitation.
Madeleine tried not to seem overeager. At dinner, she paid attention to Brian Weeger, whose breath had a dog-food smell. A couple of times, when she looked over at Leonard, he stared back, fixedly, appearing almost upset. Later, when Madeleine was in the kitchen, rinsing dishes, Leonard came in. She turned to find him inspecting a bump on the wall.