View all notes
“Who’s your father?” he asked Madeleine. “Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?”
“In my case,” Madeleine said, “my father really is my father.”
“Then you have to kill him.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Godard,” he said.
lol
What she hadn’t expected when it came to a fraternity was a sunny-haired silent type like Dabney, learning his lines in a folding chair, in parachute pants, shoeless. Looking back on their relationship, Madeleine figured she’d had no choice. Dabney and she had been selected for each other in a Royal Wedding kind of way. She was Prince Charles to his Princess Di. She knew he couldn’t act. Dabney had the artistic soul of a third-string tight end. In life Dabney moved and said little. Onstage he moved not at all but had to say a lot. His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate.
lol
When Dabney returned from his review with Churchill, he looked even more self-contented than usual.
“So?” Madeleine asked. “How did it go?”
“He says I’m perfect for soaps.”
“Soap commercials?”
Dabney looked peeved. “Days of Our Lives. General Hospital. Ever heard of those?”
“Did he mean that as a compliment?”
“How else could he mean it? Soap actors have it made! They work every day, make great money, and never have to travel. I’ve been wasting my time trying to get all this advertising work. Screw that. I’m going to tell my agent to start lining up some auditions for soaps.”
Madeleine was silent at this news. She’d assumed Dabney’s enthusiasm for modeling was temporary, a tuition-earning scheme. Now she realized he was in earnest. She was, in fact, dating a model.
lmao
“Man, am I ever lucky,” Dabney said. “What would I do if you weren’t around? You have to catch all the subtleties for me, don’t you? You and your flair for catching subtleties. It must be nice to be rich and sit around all day catching subtleties. What do you know about needing to make a living? It’s fine for you to make fun of my ad. You didn’t get into college on a football scholarship. And now you have to come in here and run me down. You know what? This is bullshit. This is total bullshit. I’m sick of your condescension and your superiority complex. And Churchill’s right. You can’t act.”
In the end Madeleine had to admit that Dabney was far more fluent than she’d ever expected. He was capable of portraying a range of emotions, too, anger, disgust, wounded pride, and of simulating others, including affection, passion, and love. He had a great career in the soaps ahead of him.
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.
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. [...]
“All this time we’ve been walking? I’ve been leading you back to my place. This is how I do it, apparently. It’s shameful. Shameful. I don’t want it to be like that. Not with you. So I’m telling you.”
“I figured we were going back to your place.”
“You did?”
“I was going to call you on it. When we got closer.”
“We’re already close.”
“I can’t come up.”
“Please.”
“No. Not tonight.”
“Hannaesque,” Leonard said. “Stubborn. Given to ironclad positions.”
“Hannarian,” Madeleine said. “Dangerous. Not to be messed with.”
“I stand warned.”
They stood looking at each other on cold, dark Planet Street. Leonard took his hands out of his pockets to tuck his long hair behind his ears.
“Maybe I’ll come up just for a minute,” Madeleine said.
The apartment had a message. The message said: I am an orphan. Abby and Olivia asked Madeleine what she and Leonard did together and she never had an answer. They didn’t do anything. She came to his apartment and they lay down on the mattress and Leonard asked her how she was doing, really wanting to know. What did they do? She talked; he listened; then he talked and she listened. She’d never met anyone, and certainly not a guy, who was so receptive, who took everything in. She guessed that Leonard’s shrink-like manner came from years of seeing shrinks himself, and though another of her rules was to never date guys who went to shrinks, Madeleine began to reconsider this prohibition. Back home, she and her sister had a phrase for serious emotional talks. They called it “having a heavy.” If a boy approached during one, the girls would look up and give warning: “We’re having a heavy.” And the boy would retreat. Until it was over. Until the heavy had passed.
You must be logged in to see this comment.
“I use the washer,” Leonard said. “Just not every Wednesday. I don’t equate dirt with death and decay.”
“Oh, and I do? I’m obsessed with death because I wash my sheets?”
“People’s attitudes to cleanliness have a lot to do with their fear of death.”
“This isn’t about death, Leonard. This is about crumbs in the bed. This is about the fact that your pillow smells like a liverwurst sandwich.”
“Wrong.”
“It does!”
“Wrong.”
“Smell it, Leonard!”
“It’s salami. I don’t like liverwurst.”
In the weeks following the toga party, Mitchell began appearing at Madeleine’s dorm unannounced. After his afternoon Latin class, he walked through the cool leaf-smelling air to Wayland Quad and, his head still throbbing with Vergil’s dactylic hexameter, climbed the stairs to her third-floor room. Standing in Madeleine’s doorway or, on luckier days, sitting at her desk, Mitchell did his best to be amusing. Madeleine’s roommate, Jennifer, always gave him a look indicating that she knew exactly why he was there. Fortunately, she and Madeleine didn’t seem to get along, and Jenny often left them alone. Madeleine always seemed happy he’d dropped by. She immediately started telling him about whatever she was reading, while he nodded, as though he could possibly pay attention to her thoughts on Ezra Pound or Ford Madox Ford while standing close enough to smell her shampooed hair. Sometimes Madeleine made him tea. Instead of going for an herbal infusion from Celestial Seasonings, with a quotation from Lao Tzu on the package, Madeleine was a Fortnum & Mason’s drinker, her favorite blend Earl Grey. She didn’t just dump a bag in a cup, either, but brewed loose leaves, using a strainer and a tea cozy. Jennifer had a poster of Vail over her bed, a skier waist-deep in powder. Madeleine’s side of the room was more sophisticated. She’d hung up a set of framed Man Ray photographs. Her bedspread and cashmere sham were the same serious shade of charcoal gray as her V-neck sweaters. On top of her dresser lay exciting womanly objects: a monogrammed silver lipstick, a Filofax containing maps of the New York Subway and the London Underground. But there were also semiembarrassing items: a photograph of her family wearing color-coordinated clothing; a Lilly Pulitzer bathrobe; and a decrepit stuffed bunny named Foo Foo.
Mitchell was prepared, considering Madeleine’s other attributes, to overlook these details.
lol