The Marriage Plot (60 page)

He paused. He settled back. The word had been said. It seemed that voicing it had been Alton’s main objective all along, and now that he’d said it he was momentarily at a loss. Madeleine was scowling.

“An annulment is a lot simpler than a divorce,” Alton continued. “For a lot of reasons. It represents a voiding of the marriage. It’s as though the marriage never was. With an annulment, you’re not a divorcée. It’s as though you never were married. And the best thing is, you don’t need both parties to get an annulment. Roger also looked into the statutes in Massachusetts, and it turns out that annulments are granted for the following reasons.” He counted them off with his fingers. “One: bigamy. Two: impotence on the part of the male. Three: mental illness.”

Here he stopped. The crickets seemed to get louder and, over the dark backyard, as if this were a lovely summer evening, lightning bugs began magically to flash.

The silence was broken by the sound of Madeleine’s wineglass smashing against the deck. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going inside!”

“Maddy, we need to discuss this.”

“All you know how to do whenever there’s a problem is talk to your lawyer!”

“Well, I’m glad I called Roger about that prenuptial agreement you didn’t want to sign,” Alton said, unwisely.

“Right!” Madeleine said. “Thank God I didn’t lose any money! My whole life is ruined but at least I didn’t lose any of my capital! This isn’t a board meeting, Daddy. This is my life!” And with that, she fled to her bedroom.

For the next three days, Madeleine refused to eat with her parents. She seldom came downstairs. This put Mitchell in an awkward position. As the only impartial person in the house, it was up to him to maintain communication among the parties. He felt like Philip Habib, the special Middle East envoy, whom he saw every night on the evening news. Keeping Alton company during the cocktail hour, Mitchell watched Habib meeting with Yassir Arafat, or Hafez al-Assad, or Ariel Sharon, going back and forth, bringing messages, cajoling, goading, threatening, flattering, and trying to keep full-scale war from breaking out. After his second gin and tonic Mitchell was inspired to draw comparisons. Barricaded in her bedroom, Madeleine was like a PLO faction hiding out in Beirut, emerging every so often to lob a bomb down the stairs. Alton and Phyllida, occupying the rest of the house, were like the Israelis, unrelenting and better armed, seeking to extend a protectorate over Lebanon and make Madeleine’s decisions for her. On his shuttle missions to Madeleine’s lair, Mitchell listened to her complaints. She said that Alton and Phyllida had never liked Leonard. They hadn’t wanted her to marry him. True, they’d treated him well after his breakdown, and hadn’t so much as mentioned the word
divorce
until Leonard had said it first. But now Madeleine felt that her parents were secretly happy that Leonard was gone, and for this she wanted to punish them. After gathering as much information about Madeleine’s feelings as possible, Mitchell returned downstairs to confer with Alton and Phyllida. He found them to be far more sympathetic to Madeleine’s plight than Madeleine gave them credit for. Phyllida admired her loyalty to Leonard, but thought it was a losing proposition. “Madeleine thinks she can save Leonard,” she said. “But the truth is that he either can’t be saved or doesn’t want to be.” Alton put on a stern front, saying that Madeleine had “to cut her losses,” but it was clear from his frequent silences, and from the stiff drinks he sipped while Habib limped in plaid slacks across yet another stretch of desert tarmac on TV, how much he was suffering on Madeleine’s account.

Following diplomatic example, Mitchell played out his string, letting everyone vent until they finally asked for advice.

“What do you think I should do?” Madeleine asked him, three days after her blowup with Alton. Before Schneider’s party, Mitchell’s answer would have been easy. He would have said, “Divorce Bankhead and marry me.” Even now, given that Bankhead showed no desire to remain married, and had disappeared into the wilds of Oregon, there didn’t seem much hope for reconciliation. How could you stay married to someone who didn’t want to stay married to you? But Mitchell’s feeling about Bankhead had undergone a significant change since talking to him and he was beset now, troublingly, with something resembling empathy and even affection for his onetime rival.

The subject of their long dialogue in Schneider’s bedroom had been, surprisingly enough, religion. Even more surprisingly, Bankhead was the one who had initiated the discussion. He’d begun by mentioning the religious studies course they’d taken together. He said that he’d been impressed with a lot of things Mitchell had said in that class. From there, Bankhead began asking Mitchell about his own religious inclinations. He seemed jittery and listless at the same time. There was an air of desperation about his questioning, as strong and acrid as the tobacco from the cigarettes he kept rolling while they talked. Mitchell told him what he could. He provided testimony to his own specific variety of religious experience. Bankhead listened intently, receptively. He appeared eager for any help Mitchell might provide. He asked Mitchell if he meditated. He asked if he went to church. After Mitchell had said everything he could, he asked Bankhead why he was interested. And here Bankhead surprised him yet again. He said, “Can you keep a secret?” Though they didn’t know each other, though in some respects Mitchell was the last person Bankhead should have wanted to confide in, he had told Mitchell about an experience he’d had recently, on a trip to Europe, that had changed his attitude about things. He was on a beach, he said, in the middle of the night. He was looking up into the starry sky when suddenly he had the feeling that he could lift off into space, if he wanted to. He hadn’t told anybody about this experience because he hadn’t been in his right mind at the time, and this tended to discredit the experience. Nonetheless, as soon as the idea had occurred to him, it had happened: he was suddenly in space, floating past the planet Saturn. “It wasn’t at all like a hallucination,” Bankhead said. “I need to stress that. It felt like the most lucid moment of my life.” For a minute, or ten minutes, or an hour—he didn’t know—he had drifted by Saturn, examining its rings, feeling the warm glow of the planet on his face, and then he was back on Earth, on the beach, in a world of trouble. Bankhead said that the vision, or whatever it was, was the most awe-inspiring moment of his life. He said that it “felt religious.” He wanted to know Mitchell’s opinion of what had happened. Was it O.K. to think of the experience as religious, since it felt that way, or was it invalidated by the fact that he was technically insane at the time? And if it was invalid, why did it still bewitch him?

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person’s conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.

At that point, Bankhead lit another cigarette. “This is the deal with me,” he said in a quiet, intimate voice. “I’m ready to make the Kierkegaardian leap. My heart’s ready. My brain’s ready. But my legs won’t budge. I can say ‘Jump’ all day long. Nothing happens.”

After that, Bankhead had looked sad and had become instantly distant. He’d said goodbye and left the room.

The conversation changed Mitchell’s attitude toward Bankhead. He was no longer able to hate him. The part of Mitchell that would have rejoiced in Bankhead’s collapse was no longer operative. Throughout the conversation, Mitchell experienced what so many people had before him, the immensely satisfying embrace of Bankhead’s intelligent and complete attention. Mitchell felt that, under other circumstances, he and Leonard Bankhead might have been the best of friends. He understood why Madeleine had fallen in love with him, and why she had married him.

Beyond that, Mitchell couldn’t help respecting Bankhead for what he’d done. It was possible that he might recover from his depression; in fact, given time, that was more than likely. Bankhead was a smart guy. He might get his act together. But whatever success he achieved in life wasn’t going to come easy. It would always be shadowed by his disease. Bankhead had wanted to save Madeleine from that. He was a long way from working things out and he wanted to do it on his own, with minimum collateral damage.

And so the summer flowed on. Mitchell continued to stay at the Hannas’ and to take long walks to the Friends Meeting House. Whenever he suggested that it was time for him to leave, Madeleine asked him to stay a little longer, and he did. Dean and Lillian couldn’t understand why he didn’t come home right away, but their relief that he was no longer in India gave them the patience to wait a little longer to see his face.

July turned into August and still Bankhead didn’t call. One weekend, Kelly Traub came down to Prettybrook, bringing the keys to Madeleine’s new apartment. Slowly, doing a little each day, Madeleine began to pack the things she wanted to bring with her to Manhattan. In the hot storage area of the attic, wearing a tennis skirt and bikini top, her back and shoulders glistening, she picked out furniture to have shipped and went through cupboards, looking for glasses and odds and ends. She was barely eating, however. She had crying jags. She wanted to go over the chain of events again and again, beginning with the honeymoon and leading up to the party at Schneider’s, as though she might find some moment when, had she acted differently, none of it would have happened. The only times Madeleine brightened were when an old girlfriend of hers came by the house. With her friends—and the earlier made and dippier they were, the better: she was hugely fond of certain ex–Lawrenceville girls with names like Weezie—Madeleine seemed to be able to will herself back to girlhood. She went into town shopping with these friends. She spent hours trying things on. At the house, they lay by the pool, tanning and reading magazines, while Mitchell drew away to the shade of the porch, watching them from afar with desire and revulsion, exactly as
he
had done in high school. Sometimes Madeleine and her friends, growing bored, tried to coax Mitchell to come for a swim, and he put down his Merton and stood poolside, trying not to stare at Madeleine’s near-naked body gliding through the water.

“Come on in, Mitchell!” she pleaded with him.

“I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Just wear shorts.”

“I’m opposed to shorts.”

Then the Lawrenceville girls left and Madeleine became intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess. She rejoined Mitchell on the porch, where the sun-warmed paperbacks and iced coffee awaited her.

Every so often, as the days passed, Alton or Phyllida would make an attempt to get Madeleine to decide what she wanted to do. But she kept putting them off.

September approached. Madeleine chose her fall semester seminars, one on the eighteenth-century novel (
Pamela
,
Clarissa
,
Tristram Shandy
) and another on triple-deckers, taught from a poststructuralist perspective by Jerome Shilts. Madeleine’s arrival at Columbia, it turned out, would coincide with the first class of women being admitted to the university as undergraduates, and she took this as a good omen.

As much as Madeleine wanted Mitchell around, as close as they’d become that summer, she gave no clear sign that her feelings about him had altered in any significant way. She became freer in her actions, changing clothes in front of him, only saying, “Don’t look.” And he didn’t. He averted his eyes, and
listened
to her undressing. Making a move on Madeleine seemed unfair. It would be taking advantage of her sadness. Being pawed by a guy was the last thing she needed right now.

One Saturday night, late, while Mitchell was reading in bed, he heard the door to the attic open. Madeleine came up to his room. Instead of sitting on his bed, however, she just poked her head in and said, “I want to show you something.” She disappeared. Mitchell waited while she shuffled around the attic, moving boxes. After a few minutes, she returned, holding a shoe box. In her other hand was an academic journal.

“Ta-da!” Madeleine said, handing the journal to him. “This came in the mail today.” It was a copy of
The Janeite Review
, edited by M. Myerson, and containing an essay by one Madeleine Hanna titled “I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot.” It was a marvelous thing to see, even though a printing error had transposed two pages of the essay. Madeleine looked happier than she’d looked in months. Mitchell congratulated her, whereupon she proceeded to show him the shoe box. It was covered with dust. Madeleine had unearthed it from one of the cupboards as she was packing. The shoe box had been there for close to ten years. On the lid, in black ink, were the words “Bachelorette’s Survival Kit.” Madeleine explained how Alwyn had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday. She showed Mitchell all the items inside, the Ben Wa balls, the French tickler, the plastic fornicators, and, of course, the dehydrated prick, which was now hard to identify. Mice had nibbled the breadstick. At some point during all this, Mitchell got the courage to do what he’d been too scared to do at nineteen years of age. He said, “You should take that to New York with you. That’s just what you need.” And when Madeleine looked at him, he reached up and pulled her down onto the bed.

The rush of details that followed overwhelmed Mitchell’s ability to take immediate pleasure in them. As he removed Madeleine’s clothing, layer by layer, he was confronted by the physical reality of things he had long imagined. An uncomfortable tension existed between the two, with the result that after a while neither felt entirely real. Was this really Madeleine’s breast he was taking into his mouth, or was it something he had dreamed, or was he dreaming now? Why, if she was finally there before him in the flesh, did she seem to be so odorless, and vaguely alien? He did his best; he persevered. He put his head between Madeleine’s legs and opened his mouth, as though singing, but the space was somehow unwelcoming, and her answering calls sounded far away. He felt very alone. This didn’t disappoint Mitchell so much as bewilder him. At one point, while Madeleine was nuzzling his own nipple, she groaned and said, “You really need to start using deodorant, Mitchell.” Not long after, she fell asleep.