The Marriage Plot (35 page)
“Hello?”
“Hi. This is Mitchell. We met the other day at American Express.”
“Praise God!” Janice said. “I’ve been praying for you. And here you are calling. Praise the Lord!”
“I found your card, so.”
“Are you ready to accept the Lord into your heart?”
This was rather sudden. Mitchell looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack running its length.
“Yes,” he said.
“Praise the Lord!” Janice said again. She sounded truly happy, enthused. She began talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while Mitchell listened, experimentally. He was playing along and not playing along. He wanted to see what it felt like. “I told you we were meant to meet!” Janice said. “God put it on my heart to talk to you and now you’re ready to be saved! Praise Jesus.” Next she was talking about the book of Acts, and Pentecost, about Jesus ascending to heaven but giving Christians the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the wind that surpasseth all understanding. She explained the gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues, healing the sick. She sounded thrilled for Mitchell but also as though she could have been talking to anyone at all. “The Spirit listeth where it wills. It’s as real as the wind. Will you pray with me now, Mitchell? Will you get down on your knees and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
“I can’t right now.”
“Where are you?”
“In my hotel. In the lobby.”
“Then wait until you’re alone. Go into a room alone and get down on your knees and ask the Lord to come into your heart.”
“Have you ever spoken in tongues?” Mitchell asked.
“I was given the gift of tongues once, yes.”
“How does that happen?”
“I asked for it. Sometimes you have to ask. One day I was praying and I just started praying to receive my tongues. All of a sudden, the room got really warm. It was like Indiana in the summertime.
Humid.
There was a presence there. I could feel it. And then I opened my mouth and God gave me the gift of tongues.”
“What did you say?”
“I don’t know. But there was a man there, a Christian, who recognized the language I was speaking. It was Aramaic.”
“The language of Jesus.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Can I speak in tongues, too?”
“You can ask. Sure you can. Once you’ve accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you just ask the Father to give you the gift of tongues, in Jesus’ name.”
“And then what?”
“Open your mouth!”
“And it’ll just happen?”
“I’ll pray for you. Praise God!”
After hanging up, Mitchell went out to see the Acropolis. He wore both of his remaining shirts in order to stay warm. Reaching the Plaka, he passed by the souvenir stands selling imitation Grecian urns and plates, sandals, worry beads. A T-shirt on a hanger proclaimed “Kiss Me I’m Greek.” Mitchell began climbing up the dusty switchbacks to the ancient plateau.
When he reached the top, he turned and gazed back down at Athens, a giant bathtub filled with dirty suds. Clouds were swirling dramatically overhead, pierced by sunbeams that fell like spotlights on the distant sea. The majestic altitude, the clean scent of pine trees, and the golden light lent the atmosphere a true sense of Attic clarity. Scaffolding covered the Parthenon, as well as a smaller temple nearby. Aside from that, and a lone guard station at the far end of the summit, there were no signs of officialdom anywhere, and Mitchell felt free to roam wherever he wanted.
The wind bloweth where it listeth.
Unlike every other famous tourist sight Mitchell had seen in his life, the Acropolis was more impressive in reality; no postcard or photograph could do it justice. The Parthenon was both bigger and more beautiful, more heroically conceived and constructed, than he’d imagined.
Larry was nowhere in sight. Mitchell walked over the rocks, behind the small temple. When he was certain no one could see him, he got down on his knees.
Maybe listening to a woman going on about “living for Christ” represented the exact sort of humbling that Mitchell needed in order to die to his old conceited self. What if the meek really
would
inherit the earth? What if the truth was simple, so that everyone could grasp it, and not complex, so that you needed a master’s degree? Mightn’t the truth be perceived through an organ other than the brain, and wasn’t that what faith was all about? Mitchell didn’t know the answers to these questions, but as he stood gazing down from the ancient mountain, sacred to Athena, he entertained a revolutionary thought: that he and all his enlightened friends knew nothing about life, and that maybe this (crazy?) lady knew something big.
Mitchell closed his eyes, kneeling on the Acropolis.
He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness.
Kiss me I’m dying.
He opened his mouth. He waited.
The wind whipped up, blowing litter between the rocks. Mitchell could taste dust on his tongue. But that was about it.
Nothing. Not even a syllable of Aramaic. After another minute, he got up and brushed himself off.
He descended the Acropolis quickly, as if fleeing a disaster. He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to. The sun was going down, the temperature dropping. In the Plaka, souvenir vendors were closing up their stands, neon signs blinking on in the windows of neighboring restaurants and coffee shops.
He passed his hotel three times without recognizing it. While he was out, the elevator had broken down. Mitchell climbed the stairwell to the second floor and came down the soulless hallway, putting his key in the lock.
As soon as he pushed open the door, there was movement in the dark room, furtive and quick. Mitchell felt for the switch on the wall and, finding it, revealed Larry and Iannis in the center of the room. Larry was lying on the bed, his jeans around his ankles, while Iannis knelt beside it. Mustering a fair amount of composure under the circumstances, Larry said, “Surprise, surprise, Mitchell.” Iannis crouched down, disappearing from sight.
“Hi,” Mitchell said, and switched off the light. Stepping out of the room, he shut the door behind him.
At a restaurant across the street Mitchell ordered a carafe of retsina and a plate of feta cheese and olives, not even trying to speak a few words of Greek, just pointing. It all made sense now. Why Larry had gotten over Claire so quickly. Why he’d disappeared so often to smoke cigarettes with sketchy Europeans. Why he’d been wearing that purple silk scarf around his neck. Larry had been one person in New York and now he was a different person. This made Mitchell feel very close to his friend, even though he now suspected that this was where their trip together ended. Larry wouldn’t be flying to India with Mitchell tonight. Larry was going to stay awhile longer in Athens with Iannis.
After an hour, Mitchell went back to the hotel, where all this was confirmed. Larry promised to meet him in India, in time to work for Professor Hughes. The two of them hugged, and Mitchell carried his light duffel bag down to the lobby to get a cab to the airport.
By nine o’clock that night he was buckled into his economy seat aboard an Air India 747, leaving Christian airspace at a velocity of 522 miles per hour. The flight attendants wore saris. Dinner was a delicious vegetarian medley. He’d never really expected to speak in tongues. He didn’t know what good it would have done him, even if he had.
Later, as the cabin lights went out and the other passengers tried to sleep, Mitchell switched on his reading light. He read
Something Beautiful for God
for the second time, paying close attention to the photographs.
S
hortly after learning that Madeleine’s mother not only didn’t like him but was actively trying to break them up, at a time of year on the Cape when the brevity of daylight mimicked the diminishing wattage of his own brain, Leonard found the courage to take his destiny, in the form of his mental disorder, into his own hands.
It was a brilliant move. The reason Leonard hadn’t thought of it earlier was just another side effect of the drug. Lithium was very good at inducing a mental state in which taking lithium seemed like a good idea. It tended to make you just sit there. Sitting there, at any rate, was pretty much what Leonard had been doing for the last six months since getting out of the hospital. He’d asked his psychiatrists—both Dr. Shieu at Providence Hospital and his new shrink, Perlmann, at Mass General—to explain the biochemistry involved in lithium carbonate (Li
2
CO
3
). Humoring him as a “fellow scientist,” they’d talked about neurotransmitters and receptors, decreases in norepinephrine releases, increases in serotonin synthesis. They’d listed, but hadn’t elaborated on, the possible downsides of taking lithium, and then mainly to discuss yet more drugs that would be helpful in minimizing the side effects. All in all, it was a lot of pharmacology and pharmaceutical brand names for Leonard to digest, especially in his compromised mental condition.
Four years ago, when Leonard had been officially diagnosed with manic depression in the spring semester of his freshman year, he hadn’t thought much about what the lithium was doing to him. He’d just wanted to get back to feeling normal. The diagnosis had seemed like one more thing—like lack of money, and his messed-up family—that had threatened to keep Leonard from getting ahead, just when he was beginning to feel that his luck had finally changed. He took his meds twice daily, like an A student. He started therapy, first seeing a mental health counselor at Health Services before finding Bryce Ellis, who took pity on Leonard’s student poverty and charged him on a sliding scale. For the next three years, Leonard treated his manic depression like a concentration requirement in something he wasn’t much interested in, doing the bare minimum to pass.
Leonard had grown up in an Arts & Crafts house whose previous owner had been murdered in the front hall. The grisly history of 133 Linden Street had kept the house on the market for four years until Leonard’s father, Frank, bought it for half the original asking price. Frank Bankhead owned an antique-print shop on Nob Hill specializing in British lithographs. It was a terrible business, even back then, the shop a place where Frank could go during the days to smoke his pipe and wait for cocktail hour. Growing up, Leonard was made to understand by Frank that the Bankheads were “old Portland,” by which he meant the families who’d come to Oregon when it was still part of the Northwest Territory. There wasn’t much sign of this, no Bankhead Street downtown, not so much as an old signboard or a plaque saying “Bankhead” anywhere, or a bust of a Bankhead in the Oregon Historical Society. But there were Frank’s three-piece tweed suits, and his old-fashioned manners. There was his shop, full of things that no one wanted to buy: lithographs not of the city’s early days or anything that might interest a local, but of places like Bath or Cornwall or Glasgow. There were hunt prints, scenes of revelry in London taverns, sketches of pickpockets, two prize Hogarths that Frank could never part with, and a lot of junk.
The print shop barely broke even. The Bankheads survived on dwindling income from stocks that Frank had inherited from his grandfather. Every so often, at an estate sale, he got his hands on a valuable print that he would then resell for a profit (sometimes flying to New York to do so). But the trajectory of the business was downward, in contrast to his social pretensions, and that was why Frank had got interested in the house.
He first heard about it from a client who lived in the neighborhood. The previous owner, a bachelor named Joseph Wierznicki, had been knifed to death, just inside his front door, with such violence that the police had said the crime was “personal.” No one had been apprehended. The story had made the papers, complete with photos of the blood-spattered walls and flooring. And that might have been the end of it. In due course, the house was put on the market. Workers cleaned and refurbished the front hall. But a statute on the books requiring real estate agents to reveal any information that might affect resale obligated them to mention the house’s criminal history. When prospective buyers heard about the murder, they looked into it (if still interested), and, as soon as they saw the photographs, they declined to make offers.
Leonard’s mother refused to even consider the idea. She didn’t think she could bear the strain of moving, especially into a haunted house. Rita spent most days in her bedroom, leafing through magazines or watching
The Mike Douglas Show
, her “water” glass on the bedside table. Every so often she became a whirlwind of domestic activity, decorating every inch of the house at Christmastime or cooking elaborate six-course dinners. For as long as Leonard could remember, his mother was either in retreat from other people or forcefully trying to impress them. The only other person he knew who was as unpredictable as Rita was Frank.
That was a fun parlor game to play: from which side of the family had his mental instability descended. There were so many possible sources, so much spoiled fruit on the family trees of the Bankhead and Richardson clans. Alcoholics populated both sides. Rita’s sister, Ruth, had led a wild life, sexually and financially. She’d been arrested a few times and had attempted suicide at least once that he knew. Then there were Leonard’s grandparents, whose rectitude had something desperate about it, as though it was holding back a tide of riotous impulse. Despite his father’s buttoned-up appearance, Leonard knew him to be depressive as well as misanthropic, prone, when drunk, to ranting about “the vulgus” and to fits of grandiosity, where he talked about moving to Europe and living in high style.
The house appealed to Frank’s conception of himself. It was a much nicer, bigger house than he could otherwise afford, with detailed woodwork in the parlor, a tiled fireplace, and four bedrooms. One afternoon, coming home from the shop early, he took Rita and Leonard to see it. When they arrived at the house, Rita refused to get out of the car. So Frank took Leonard, only seven at the time, in alone. They toured the house with the real estate agent, Frank pointing out where Leonard’s new bedroom would be on the first floor, and the backyard where, if he wanted, he could build a tree house.