The Marriage Plot (34 page)

To his surprise, the letter itself wasn’t typed but handwritten in Madeleine’s tiny script. (She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.)

Aug. 31, 1982

Dear Mitchell,

I’m writing this from the train, the same Amtrak you and I took when you came to Prettybrook for Thanksgiving sophomore year. It was colder then, the trees were bare, and my hair was “feathered” (it was still the seventies, if you’ll remember). But you didn’t seem to mind.

I’ve never told you this before, but the entire way down on the train for Thanksgiving, I was thinking about sleeping with you. For one thing, I could tell that you wanted to very badly. I knew it would make you happy and I wanted to make you happy. Aside from that, I had the idea that it would be good for me. I’d only slept with one boy at that point. I was worried that virginity was like getting your ears pierced. If you didn’t keep an earring in, the hole might close up. Anyway, I went off to college prepared to be as unemotional and dastardly as a guy. And you appeared in that little window of opportunity.

Then of course you were devastatingly charming all weekend. My parents loved you, my sister started flirting with you—and I got possessive. You were
my
guest, after all. So I went up to the attic one night and sat on your bed. And you did exactly
Nothing
. After about a half hour, I went back downstairs. At first I just felt insulted. But after a while I felt mad. I decided you weren’t man enough for me, etc. I vowed never to sleep with you, ever, even if you wanted to. Then, the next day, we took the train back to Providence, and we laughed the whole way. I realized that it was much better this way. For once in my life I wanted to have a friend who wasn’t a girlfriend and wasn’t a boyfriend. Aside from our recent slip-up, that’s what you’ve been to me. I know it hasn’t made you happy. But to me it’s been incredible, and I always thought that, deep down, you felt this too.

Sophomore year is a long time ago now. It’s the eighties. The trees along the Hudson are green and leafy and I feel about a hundred years older. You aren’t the boy I rode this train with, Mitchell. I don’t have to feel sorry for you anymore, or go to bed with you out of affection and pity. You’re going to do all right for yourself. In fact, I need to be wary of you now. You were rather aggressive last night. Jane Austen might say “importunate.” I told you not to kiss me, but you went right on doing it. And even though, once it got going, I didn’t exactly complain (I was drunk!), I woke up this morning, at Kelly’s, feeling so guilty and confused that I decided I had to write you right away.

(The train is shaking. I hope you can read this.)

I have a
boyfriend
, Mitchell. I’m serious about him. I didn’t want to talk about my boyfriend last night because you always get mad when I do, and because, to be honest, I came down to the city to forget about my boyfriend for a few days. Leonard and I have been having problems lately. I can’t go into why. But it’s been hard on him, hard on me, and hard on our relationship. Anyway, if I wasn’t going out of my mind, I wouldn’t have drunk so much last night and I wouldn’t have ended up kissing you. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have wanted to. Just that I wouldn’t have done it.

It’s strange, though, because right now, part of me wants to get off at the next station and go back to New York and find you. But it’s too late for that. Your plane has probably taken off. You’re on your way to India.

Which is a good thing.
Because it didn’t work out!
You didn’t become the friend who wasn’t a girlfriend or a boyfriend. You became just another importunate male. So what I’m doing in this letter is proactively breaking up with you. Our relationship has always defied categorization, so I guess it makes sense if this letter does too.

Dear Mitchell,

I don’t want to see you anymore (even though we haven’t been seeing each other).

I want to start seeing other people (even though I’m already seeing someone).

I need some time for myself (even though you haven’t been taking up my time).

Okay? Do you get it now? I’m desperate. I’m taking desperate measures.

I expect to be heartbroken, not having you in my life. But I’m already confused enough about my life and my relationship without you confusing me more. I want to break up with you, as hard as that may be—and as stupid as it may sound. I’ve always been a sane person. Right now, I feel like I’m falling apart.

Have a great amazing incredible time on your trip. See all the places and sights you wanted to, have all the experiences you’re seeking. Maybe someday, at our 50th college reunion, you’ll see a wrinkled old lady come up to you with a smile, and that will be me. Maybe then you can tell me about all the things you saw in India.

Take care,
Maddy

P.S. Sept. 27

I’ve been carrying this letter around for almost a month, contemplating whether to send it or not. And I keep not sending it. I’m on Cape Cod now, up to my ears in biologists, and I may not survive.

P.P.S. Oct. 6

I just got off the phone with your mother. I realized I didn’t have an address for you. Your mother said you were “on the road” and couldn’t be reached but that you would be picking up your mail sometime at AmEx in Athens. She gave me the address. By the way, you should maybe call your parents. Your mother sounds worried.

Okay. I’m sending this.

M.

Somewhere above the taverna’s roof, in the black Greek sky, two thunderheads collided, loosing torrents of rain on the village and turning the sloping streets into waterfalls. Five minutes later, while Mitchell was reading the letter for the second time, the electricity went out.

In the darkness, he lay awake, evaluating the situation. He understood that Madeleine’s letter was a devastating document. And he was suitably devastated. On the other hand, Madeleine had been putting Mitchell off so long that her refusals were like boilerplate that his eyes skimmed over, looking for possible loopholes or buried clauses of real significance. In this regard he found a lot to like. There was the mood-elevating revelation that Madeleine had wanted to sleep with him on that long-ago Thanksgiving break. There was a hotness to the missive that seemed unlike Madeleine but promised a whole new side to her. She was worried that the hole might close up?
Madeleine
had written this? He’d heard that women were just as filthy-minded as guys were, but he’d never believed it. If Madeleine had been thinking about sex on that train ride, however, while turning the pages of her
Vogue
, if she had come up to the attic intent on fucking, then it was obvious that he’d never been able to read her at all. This thought sustained him for a good while, as the storm churned overhead. Of all the other things Madeleine might have chosen to do, she had sat down and written Mitchell a letter. She’d said that she enjoyed kissing him and that she had an urge to get off the train and come back to New York. She had typed Mitchell’s name and licked the envelope and typed her return address, so that he could write her back, so that he knew where to find her, if he wanted to look.

Every letter was a love letter.

Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century. It was dispiriting that she had insisted that she was “serious” about her “boyfriend” (though cheering that they were having “problems”). Mostly, what Mitchell took from the letter was the painful fact that he had missed his chance. His chance with Madeleine had come early, sophomore year, and he’d failed to seize it. This further depressed him because it suggested that he was destined to be a voyeur in life, an also-ran, a loser. It was just as Madeleine said: he wasn’t man enough for her.

The following days were a tribulation to the spirit. In Kalamata, a seaside city that smelled not of olives, as Mitchell expected, but of gasoline, he kept meeting his doppelgangers. The waiter at the restaurant, the boat repairman, the hotel owner’s son, the female bank teller: they all looked exactly like him. Mitchell even resembled a few icons in the crumbling local church. Instead of providing a sense of homecoming, the experience sapped Mitchell, as if he’d been photocopied over and over again, a faint reproduction of some clearer, darker original.

The weather turned colder. At night the temperature dropped into the low 40s. Wherever they went, half-built structures rose from the rocky hillsides. To encourage new construction, the Greek parliament had passed a law that exempted people from paying taxes on unfinished homes. The Greeks had responded, craftily, by leaving the top floors of their houses perpetually uncompleted, while dwelling snugly beneath. For two cold nights, in the village of Itylo, Mitchell and Larry slept for one dollar apiece on the unfinished third story of a house belonging to the Lamborghos family. The oldest son, Iannis, had chatted them up as they got off the bus in the town square. Soon he was showing them the roof, littered with rebar and cinder block, where they could sleep beneath the stars, using their sleeping bags and Ensolite pads for the first and only time on their trip.

Despite the language barrier, Larry began spending time with Iannis. While Mitchell drank coffee in the village’s one café, still secretly smarting from Madeleine’s letter, Iannis and Larry went on walks into the surrounding, goat-filled hillsides. Iannis had the jet-black mane and chest-revealing shirt of a Greek singing idol. His teeth were bad, and he was something of a hanger-on, but he seemed friendly enough, if you felt like being friendly, which Mitchell didn’t. When Iannis offered to drive them back to Athens, however, saying he had business there, Mitchell didn’t see how he could refuse, and the next morning they set off in Iannis’s tiny, Yugoslavian-made automobile, Larry sitting in front, Mitchell in the rumble seat behind.

Christmas was approaching. The streets around their hotel, a nondescript gray building to which Iannis referred them, were decorated with lights. The temperature alone reminded them that it was time to leave for Asia. After Iannis left to take care of his business, Larry and Mitchell went to a travel agent to buy their airplane tickets. Athens was famous for its cheap airfares, and so it proved: for less than five hundred dollars, they each got an open-ended ticket, Athens–Calcutta–Paris, on Air India, leaving the following night.

Iannis took them to a seafood restaurant that evening, and to three different bars, before dropping them back at the hotel. The next morning Mitchell and Larry went to the Plaka and bought new, smaller bags. Larry chose a gaily striped shoulder bag made from hemp; Mitchell a dark duffel bag. Back at their hotel, they transferred essential belongings into the new packs, trying to keep them as light as possible. They got rid of their sweaters, their pairs of long pants, their tennis shoes, their sleeping bags and pads, their books, even their shampoo. Mitchell culled his Saint Teresa, his Saint Augustine, his Thomas Merton, his Pynchon, relieving himself of everything but the thin paperback of
Something Beautiful for God.
Whatever they didn’t need, they put in their backpacks and carried to the post office, shipping it back to the States by slow boat. Coming onto the street again, they high-fived each other, feeling like real travelers for the first time, footloose and unencumbered.

Mitchell’s bright mood didn’t last long. Among the items he’d kept was Madeleine’s letter, and when they got back to their hotel, he locked himself in the bathroom to read it once again. This time through, it seemed more dire, more final, than before. Coming out of the bathroom, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

Larry was smoking on the balcony. “We haven’t seen the Acropolis yet,” he said. “We have to see it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Mitchell muttered.

“We haven’t climbed it.”

“I don’t feel like it right now.”

“You come all the way to Athens and you’re not going to see the Acropolis?”

“I’ll meet you,” Mitchell said.

He waited until Larry was gone before allowing himself to cry. It was a combination of things, Madeleine’s letter, first and foremost, but also the aspects of his personality that had made her feel such a letter necessary, his awkwardness, his charm, his aggressiveness, his shyness, everything that made him almost but not quite the guy for her. The letter felt like a verdict on his entire life so far, sentencing him to end up here, lying on a bed, alone, in an Athenian hotel room, too weighed down by self-pity to go out and climb the goddamn Acropolis. The idea that he was on some kind of pilgrimage seemed ludicrous. The whole thing was such a joke! If only he wasn’t himself! If only he was somebody else, somebody different!

Mitchell sat up, wiping his eyes. Leaning sideways, he pulled the New Testament out of his back pocket. He opened it and took out the card the woman had given him. It said “Athens Bible Institute” at the top and showed the Greek flag with the cross in gold. Her number was written beneath this.

Mitchell dialed it from his room phone. The call didn’t go through the first two times (he had the prefix wrong), but on his third try it began ringing. To his amazement, the woman from the AmEx line, Janice P., her voice sounding very close, answered.