The Marriage Plot Read Free Page B

indeed there. His lips were moving, as if he was talking to himself.
    “Why don’t you invite him to join us?” Phyllida said.
    “Now?”
    “Why not? I’d love to see Mitchell.”
    “He’s probably waiting for his parents,” Madeleine said.
    Phyllida waved, despite the fact that Mitchell was too far away to notice.
    “What’s he doing sitting on the ground?” Alton asked.
    The three Hannas stared across the street at Mitchell in his half-lotus.
    “Well, if you’re not going to ask him, I will,” Phyllida finally said.
    “O.K.,” Madeleine said. “Fine. I’ll go ask him.”
    The day was getting warmer, but not by much. Black clouds were massing in the distance as Madeleine came down the steps of Carr House and crossed the street into the churchyard. Someone inside the church was testing the loudspeakers, fussily repeating, “Sussex, Essex, and Kent. Sussex, Essex, and Kent.” A banner draped over the church entrance read “Class of 1982.” Beneath the banner, in the grass, was Mitchell. His lips were still moving silently, but when he noticed Madeleine approaching they abruptly stopped.
    Madeleine remained a few feet away.
    “My parents are here,” she informed him.
    “It’s graduation,” Mitchell replied evenly. “Everyone’s parents are here.”
    “They want to say hello to you.”
    At this Mitchell smiled faintly. “They probably don’t realize you’re not speaking to me.”
    “No, they don’t,” Madeleine said. “And, anyway, I am. Now. Speaking to you.”
    “Under duress or as a change of policy?”
    Madeleine shifted her weight, wrinkling her face unhappily. “Look. I’m really hungover. I barely slept last night. My parents have been here about ten minutes and they’re already driving me crazy. So if you could just come over and say hello, that would be great.”
    Mitchell’s large emotional eyes blinked twice. He was wearing a vintage gabardine shirt, dark wool pants, and beat-up wingtips. Madeleine had never seen him in shorts or tennis shoes.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “About what happened.”
    “Fine,” Madeleine said, looking away. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “I was just being my usual vile self.”
    “So was I.”
    They were quiet a moment. Madeleine felt Mitchell’s eyes on her, and she crossed her arms over her chest.
    What had happened was this: one night the previous December, in a state of anxiety about her romantic life, Madeleine had run into Mitchell on campus and brought him back to her apartment. She’d needed male attention and had flirted with him, without entirely admitting it to herself. In her bedroom, Mitchell had picked up a jar of deep-heating gel on her desk, asking what it was for. Madeleine had explained that people who were athletic sometimes got sore muscles. She understood that Mitchell might not have experienced this phenomenon, seeing as all he did was sit in the library, but he should take her word for it. At that point, Mitchell had come up behind her and wiped a gob of heating gel behind her ear. Madeleine jumped up, shouting at Mitchell, and wiped the gunk off with a T-shirt. Though she was within her rights to be angry, Madeleine also knew (even at the time) that she was using the incident as a pretext for getting Mitchell out of her bedroom and for covering up the fact that she’d been flirting with him in the first place. The worst part of the incident was how stricken Mitchell had looked, as if he’d been about to cry. He kept saying he was sorry, he was just joking around, but she ordered him to leave. In the following days, replaying the incident in her mind, Madeleine had felt worse and worse about it. She’d been on the verge of calling Mitchell to apologize when she’d received a letter from him, a highly detailed, cogently argued, psychologically astute, quietly hostile four-page letter, in which he called her a “cocktease” and claimed that her behavior that night had been “the erotic equivalent of bread and