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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.
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“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
When Mitchell glanced at Madeleine, she was smiling at him. And that was when it had happened. Madeleine was wearing a bathrobe. She had her glasses on. She was looking both homey and sexy, completely out of his league and, at the same time, within reach, by virtue of how well he seemed to fit into her family already, and what a perfect son-in-law he would make. For all of these reasons Mitchell suddenly thought, “I’m going to marry this girl!” The knowledge went through him like electricity, a feeling of destiny.
After another week passed without his hearing from Madeleine, Mitchell stopped calling or dropping by her room. He became fierce about his studies, spending heroic amounts of time ornamenting his English papers, or translating Vergil’s extended metaphors about vineyards and women. When he finally did run into Madeleine again, she was just as friendly as always. For the rest of the year they continued to be close, going to poetry readings together and occasionally eating dinner in the Ratty, alone or with other people. When Madeleine’s parents visited in the spring, she invited Mitchell to have dinner with them at the Bluepoint Grill. But he never went back to the house in Prettybrook, never built a fire in their hearth, or drank a G&T on the deck overlooking the garden. Little by little, Mitchell managed to forge his own social life at school and, though they continued to be friends, Madeleine drifted off into hers. He never forgot his premonition, however. One night the following October, almost a year from the time he’d gone to Prettybrook, Mitchell saw Madeleine crossing campus in the purple twilight. She was with a curly-headed blond guy named Billy Bainbridge, whom Mitchell knew from his freshman hall. Billy took women’s studies courses and referred to himself as a feminist. Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine’s jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
A lot of people had brought cameras with them. Commercials had told them to record this moment on film, and so they were going ahead and recording it.
It was possible to feel superior to other people and like a misfit at the same time.
It surprised Mitchell that Professor Richter would take part in such silly pageantry. He could have been at home reading Heidegger, but instead he was here, wasting his time to parade down a hill in honor of yet another commencement ceremony, and to parade with what appeared to be absolute exhilaration.
At the genuine endpoint of his college career, Mitchell was left with that startling sight: Herr Doktor Professor Richter prancing by, his face lit with a childlike joy it had never displayed in the seminar room for Religion and Alienation. As if Richter had found the cure for alienation. As if he’d beaten the odds of the age.