The Marriage Plot (7 page)

One afternoon, on the bulletin board outside Hillel House, Madeleine noticed a flyer announcing the Melvin and Hetty Greenberg Fellowship for summer study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and she applied for that. Using contacts of Alton’s in the publishing world, she put on a business suit and went down to New York for an informational interview with an editor at Simon and Schuster. The editor, Terry Wirth, had once been a bright, idealistic English major just like Madeleine, but she found him that afternoon, in his tiny, manuscript-piled office looking onto the gloomy canyon of Sixth Avenue, a middle-aged father of two with a salary far below the median of his former classmates and a nasty, hour-and-fifteen-minute commute to his split-level in Montclair, New Jersey. On the prospects of a book he was publishing that month, the memoir of a migrant farmer, Wirth said, “Now’s the calm before the calm.” He gave Madeleine a stack of manuscripts from the slush pile to critique, offering to pay her fifty bucks a pop.

Instead of reading the manuscripts, Madeleine took the subway down to the East Village. After buying a bag of pignoli cookies at De Robertis, she plunged into a hair salon, where, on a whim, she allowed a butch woman with a short, rat-tailed haircut to go to work on her. “Cut it close on the sides, higher on top,” Madeleine said. “You sure?” the woman said. “I’m sure,” Madeleine answered. To show her resolve, she took off her glasses. Forty-five minutes later, she put her glasses back on, horror-struck and elated at the transformation. Her head was really quite enormous. She had never fathomed its true size. She looked like Annie Lennox, or David Bowie. Like someone the hairdresser might be dating.

The Annie Lennox look was O.K., however. Androgyny was just the thing. Once she was back at school, Madeleine’s haircut proclaimed her serious frame of mind, and by the end of the year, when her bangs had grown out to a maddening length she didn’t know what to do with, she remained firm in her renunciations. (Her only slip-up had been the night in her bedroom with Mitchell, but nothing had happened.) Madeleine had her thesis to write. She had her future to figure out. The last thing she needed was a boy to distract her from her work and disturb her equilibrium. But then, during spring semester, she met Leonard Bankhead and her resolve went out the window.

He shaved irregularly. His Skoal had a menthol scent, cleaner, more pleasant than Madeleine expected. Whenever she looked up to find Leonard staring at her with his St. Bernard’s eyes (the eyes of a drooler, maybe, but also of a loyal brute who could dig you out of an avalanche), Madeleine couldn’t help staring back a significant moment longer.

One evening in early March, when she went to the Rockefeller Library to pick up the reserve reading for Semiotics 211, she found Leonard there as well. He was leaning against the counter, speaking animatedly to the girl on duty, who was unfortunately rather cute in a busty Bettie Page way.

“Think about it, though,” Leonard was saying to the girl. “Think about it from the point of view of the fly.”

“O.K., I’m a fly,” the girl said with a throaty laugh.

“We move in slow motion to them. They can see the swatter coming from a million miles away. The flies are like, ‘Wake me when the swatter gets close.’”

Noticing Madeleine, the girl told Leonard, “Just a sec.”

Madeleine held out her call order slip, and the girl took it and went off into the stacks.

“Picking up the Balzac?” Leonard said.

“Yes.”

“Balzac to the rescue.”

Normally, Madeleine would have had many things to say to this, many comments about Balzac to make. But her mind was a blank. She didn’t even remember to smile until he’d looked away.

Bettie Page came back with Madeleine’s order, sliding it toward her and immediately turning back to Leonard. He seemed different than he did in class, more exuberant, supercharged. He raised his eyebrows in a crazed, Jack Nicholson way and said, “My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older.”

“Why’s that?” the girl asked.

“It’s proportional,” Leonard explained. “When you’re five, you’ve only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you’re fifty, you’ve lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you’re five seems longer because it’s a greater percentage of the whole.”

“Yeah, sure,” the girl teased, “that follows.”

But Madeleine had understood. “That makes sense,” she said. “I always wondered why that was.”

“It’s just a theory,” Leonard said.

Bettie Page tapped Leonard’s hand to get his attention. “Flies aren’t always so fast,” she said. “I’ve caught flies in my bare hands before.”

“Especially in winter,” Leonard said. “That’s probably the kind of fly I’d be. One of those knucklehead winter flies.”

There was no good excuse for Madeleine to hang around the reserve reading room, and so she put the Balzac into her bag and headed out.

She began to dress differently on the days she had semiotics. She took out her diamond studs, leaving her ears bare. She stood in front of the mirror wondering if her Annie Hall glasses might possibly project a New Wave look. She decided not and wore her contacts. She unearthed a pair of Beatle boots she’d bought at a church basement sale in Vinalhaven. She put up her collar, and wore more black.

In Week Four, Zipperstein assigned Umberto Eco’s
The Role of the Reader.
It hadn’t done much for Madeleine. She wasn’t all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a
book
, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a
text
, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because
they
were readers.

Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. When it came to letters and literature, Madeleine championed a virtue that had fallen out of esteem: namely, clarity. The week after they read Eco, they read portions of Derrida’s
Writing and Difference
. The week after that, they read Jonathan Culler’s
On Deconstruction
, and Madeleine came to class ready to contribute to the discussion for the first time. Before she could do so, however, Thurston beat her to it.

“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
un
reasonable. 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.