It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first moment she’d seen him. She hadn’t even known him then, and so what she’d felt was only sexual attraction, not love. Even after they’d gone out for coffee, she couldn’t say that what she was feeling was anything more than infatuation. But ever since the night they went back to Leonard’s place after watching “Amarcord” and started fooling around, when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, as she often was with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she’d spent the entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off, worrying that her body wasn’t good enough, or that her breath was bad from the Caesar salad she’d unwisely ordered at dinner; worrying, too, about having suggested they order Martinis because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, “Sure. Martinis. Let’s pretend we’re Salinger characters”; after having had, as a consequence of all this anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they’d put together, and after Leonard (like every guy) had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping that she wouldn’t get a yeast infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she’d just spent the whole night worrying wasn’t, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love. And certainly after they’d spent the next three days at Leonard’s place having sex and eating pizza, after she’d relaxed enough to be able to come once in a while and finally to stop worrying so much about having an orgasm because her hunger for Leonard was in some way satisfied by his satisfaction, after she’d allowed herself to sit naked on his gross couch and to walk to the bathroom knowing that he was staring at her (imperfect) ass, to root for food in his disgusting refrigerator, to read the brilliant half page of philosophy paper sticking up out of his typewriter, and to hear him pee with taurine force into the toilet bowl, certainly, by the end of those three days, Madeleine knew she was in love.

Photograph by Kate Joyce

But that didn’t mean she had to tell anyone. Especially Leonard.

Madeleine had met Leonard in an upper-level semiotics seminar taught by a renegade from the English department. Michael Zipperstein had arrived at Brown thirty-two years earlier filled with zeal for the New Criticism. He’d inculcated the habits of close reading and biography-free interpretation into three generations of students before taking a Road to Damascus sabbatical, in Paris, in 1975, where he’d met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over duck cassoulet, to the new faith. Now Zipperstein taught two courses in the newly created Program in Semiotic Studies: Introduction to Semiotic Theory, in the fall, and, in the spring, Semiotics 211. Hygienically bald, with a seaman’s mustacheless white beard, Zipperstein favored French fisherman’s sweaters and wide-wale corduroys. He buried people with his reading lists: in addition to all the semiotic big hitters––Derrida, Eco, Barthes––the students in Semiotics 211 had to contend with a magpie nest of reserve reading that included everything from Balzac’s “Sarrasine” to issues of Semiotext(e) to xeroxed selections from E. M. Cioran, Robert Walser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Peter Handke, and Carl Van Vechten. To get into the seminar, you had to submit to a one-on-one interview with Zipperstein during which he asked bland personal questions, such as what your favorite food or dog breed was, and made enigmatic Warholian remarks in response. This esoteric probing, along with Zipperstein’s guru’s dome and beard, gave his students a sense that they’d been spiritually vetted and were now—for two hours Wednesday afternoons, at least––part of a campus lit-crit élite.

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. Madeleine had become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. The university’s “British and American Literature Course Catalogue” was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like “English 274: Lyly’s Euphues” excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. “English 450A: Hawthorne and James” filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed that was not unlike the sensation Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria. Right up through her third year of college, Madeleine had kept wholesomely taking courses like “Victorian Fantasy: From ‘Phantastes’ to ‘The Water-Babies,’ ” but by senior year she could no longer ignore the contrast between the blinky people in her Beowulf seminar and the hipsters down the hall reading Maurice Blanchot. Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism––with sex and power.

Semiotics 211 was limited to ten students. Of those ten, eight had taken Introduction to Semiotic Theory. This was visually apparent at the first class meeting. Lounging around the seminar table, when Madeleine came into the room from the wintry weather outside, were eight people in black T-shirts and ripped black jeans. A few had razored off the necks or sleeves of their T-shirts. There was something creepy about one guy’s face––it was like a baby’s face that had hideously aged––and it took Madeleine a full minute to realize that he’d shaved off his eyebrows. Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan. She was relieved, therefore, when a big guy in a down jacket and snowmobile boots showed up and took the empty seat next to her. He had a cup of takeout coffee.

Zipperstein asked the students to introduce themselves and explain why they were taking the seminar.

The boy without eyebrows spoke up first. “Um, let’s see. I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so encoded. Like, if I tell you that my name is Thurston and that I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, will you know who I am? O.K. My name’s Thurston and I’m from Greenwich, Connecticut. I’m taking this course because I read ‘Of Grammatology’ last summer and it blew my mind.” When it was the turn of the boy next to Madeleine, he said in a quiet voice that he was a double major (biology and philosophy) and had never taken a semiotics course before, that his parents had named him Leonard, that it had always seemed pretty handy to have a name, especially when you were being called to dinner, and that if anyone wanted to call him Leonard he would answer to it.

Leonard didn’t make another comment. During the rest of the class, he leaned back in his chair, stretching out his long legs. After he finished his coffee, he dug into his right snowmobile boot and, to Madeleine’s surprise, pulled out a tin of chewing tobacco. With two stained fingers, he placed a wad of tobacco in his cheek. For the next two hours, every minute or so, he spat, discreetly but audibly, into the cup.

It was the last semester of Madeleine’s senior year, a time when she was supposed to have some fun, and she wasn’t having any. She’d never thought of herself as hard up. Since breaking up with her last boyfriend, Barry, a student filmmaker, she’d enjoyed being unattached. It was a relief not to have to organize your weekend around what your boyfriend wanted to do. It was great to concentrate fully on academics, to spend time with your female friends, to skip shaving your legs for a week, if you wanted, and just wear pants. As far as Madeleine was concerned, she didn’t want a boyfriend. But when she found herself wondering what it would be like to kiss a guy who chewed tobacco she began to think she was fooling herself.

Looking back, Madeleine realized that her college love life had fallen short of expectations. Her freshman roommate, Jennifer Boomgaard, had rushed off to Health Services the first week of school to be fitted for a diaphragm. Unaccustomed to sharing a room with anybody, much less a stranger, Madeleine felt that Jennifer was a little too quick with her intimacies. She didn’t want to be shown Jennifer’s diaphragm, which reminded her of an uncooked ravioli, and she certainly didn’t want to feel the spermicidal jelly that Jennifer offered to squirt into her palm. Madeleine was frankly shocked when Jennifer started going to parties with the diaphragm already in place, when she wore it to the Harvard-Brown game, and when she left it one morning on top of their miniature fridge. That winter, when the Reverend Desmond Tutu came to campus for an anti-apartheid rally, Madeleine asked Jennifer on their way to see the great cleric, “Did you put your diaphragm in?” They lived the next four months in a twenty-by-fifteen room without speaking to each other.

Though Madeleine hadn’t arrived at college sexually inexperienced, her freshman learning curve resembled a flat line. Aside from one makeout session with a Uruguayan named Carlos, a sandal-wearing engineering student who in low light looked like Che Guevara, the only other boy she’d fooled around with was a high-school senior visiting campus for Early Action weekend. She found Tim standing in line at the Ratty, pushing his cafeteria tray along the metal track, and quietly crying. His blue blazer was too big for him. He’d spent the entire day wandering around campus with no one speaking to him. Now he was starving and wasn’t sure if he was allowed to eat in the cafeteria or not. Tim seemed to be the only person at Brown more lost than Madeleine. She helped him negotiate the Ratty and, afterward, took him on a tour of the university. Around ten-thirty that night, they ended up back in Madeleine’s dorm room. Tim had the long-lashed eyes and pretty features of an expensive Bavarian doll, a little prince or yodelling shepherd boy. His blue blazer was on the floor and Madeleine’s shirt unbuttoned when Jennifer Boomgaard came through the door. “Oh,” she said, “sorry,” and proceeded to stand there, smiling at the floor as if already relishing how this juicy bit of gossip would play along the hall. When she finally did leave, Madeleine sat up, readjusted her clothes, and Tim picked up his blazer and went back to high school.

Sophomore year hadn’t been much better, romance-wise. And then junior year she’d gone out with Barry. A sensitive male, Barry took part in Take Back the Night marches, bearing a candle up College Hill with a crowd of women. On the wall of his bedroom he painted the words “Kill the Father.” Killing the father was what, in Barry’s opinion, college was all about.

“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.”

A month or so later, Madeleine got rid of Barry instead.

Each week, Zipperstein assigned one daunting book of literary theory and one literary “text.” The pairings were eccentric, if not downright arbitrary. Madeleine still wasn’t sure to what extent Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition” had illuminated Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” In Week Four, they started on Derrida. As the class beat its way into the thickets of deconstruction, however, Madeleine’s attention often wandered to Leonard. He was as husky as a jock, and yet he spoke in a careful, soft, almost professorial tone. One week, he forgot his book and had to look over Madeleine’s shoulder. His Skoal had a menthol scent, cleaner, more pleasant than she expected. Whenever he looked 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.

The Derrida went like this: “In that sense it is the Aufhebung of other writings, particularly of hieroglyphic script and of the Leibnizian characteristic that had been criticized previously through one and the same gesture.” In poetic moods, it went like this: “What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit’s relationship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis.”

Since Derrida claimed that language, by its very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote, Madeleine wondered how Derrida expected her to get his meaning. Maybe he didn’t. That was why he deployed so much arcane terminology, so many loop-de-looping clauses. That was why he said what he said in sentences it took a minute to identify the subjects of. (Could “the access to pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality” really be a subject?)

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. Once released from Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something, anything—“The House of Mirth,” “Daniel Deronda”—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

But then, in Week Five, for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense.

It was a Friday night, just past eleven. Madeleine was in bed, reading the assigned text for that week, Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse.” She had the book in her lap. With her right hand, she was eating peanut butter, spooning it straight from the jar. The spoon fit perfectly against the roof of her mouth, allowing the peanut butter to dissolve creamily against her tongue.

For a book purportedly about love, the Barthes didn’t look very romantic. The cover was a sombre chocolate brown. Opening to the introduction, she began to read:

The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.

Outside, the temperature, which had been below freezing for the past week, had shot up to the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks puddling, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.

Madeleine had her windows open on the liquid darkness. She sucked the spoon and read on:

What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others: around the figure, the players pass the handkerchief which sometimes, by a final parenthesis, is held a second longer before handing it on. (Ideally, the book would be a cooperative: “To the United Readers and Lovers.”)

It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’s made immediate sense, were readable, digestible. It wasn’t Madeleine’s relief at recognizing that here, at last, 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. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.

It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.

After class that Wednesday, Madeleine and Leonard had ended up walking together to the Blue Room, the campus coffee shop. As they stood in line, Leonard had mentioned that the Film Society was playing a Fellini film that weekend. “Do you like Fellini?” he asked.

“You want to know something embarrassing?” Madeleine said. “I’ve never seen a Fellini film.”

“Then you should see one,” Leonard said. He asked for her phone number, and she wrote it down on the front of his notebook.

Since then, Madeleine had stayed in every night, waiting for Leonard to call. When she came back from classes in the afternoon, she interrogated her roommates to find out if Leonard had called.

“Some guy called this morning,” Olivia said, on Thursday. “When I was in the shower.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“Who was it?”

“He didn’t say. I was dripping wet.”

“Did it sound like Leonard?”

“I don’t know what Leonard sounds like.”

“Thanks for taking a message,” Madeleine said harshly.

And so now it was Friday night, her roommates had gone out to a party, and Madeleine had stayed in “to study.” She was reading “A Lover’s Discourse” and marvelling at its relevance to her life:

Waiting attente / waiting Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns). . . . Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny, unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy).

Her father had called twice already, wanting to discuss graduation plans, and she’d nearly hung up on him. She could hear the television going in the apartment below. Her bedroom window faced the state-capitol dome, brightly lit against the dark sky. The heat, which they couldn’t control, was still on, the radiator wastefully knocking and hissing.

The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t only describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

Here the telephone rang.

Madeleine dog-eared the page she was reading. She waited as long as she could (three rings) before answering.

Leonard said hello.

“Oh, hi,” Madeleine said. “I thought you might be my father. He’s freaking out about graduation already.”

“I was just having a little freakout myself.”

“About what?”

“About calling you.”

This was good. Madeleine ran a finger along her lower lip. She said, “Have you calmed down or do you want to call back later?”

“I’m resting comfortably now, thank you.”

Madeleine waited for more. None came. “Are you calling for a reason?” she asked.

“Yes. That Fellini film? I was hoping you might, if you’re not too, I know it’s bad manners calling so late, but I was at the lab.”

“I don’t think that was a complete sentence,” she said.

“What did I leave out?” Leonard asked.

“How about ‘Would you like to come with me?’ ”

“I’d love to,” Leonard said.

Madeleine frowned into the receiver. She had a feeling Leonard had set up this exchange, like a chess player thinking eight moves ahead. She was going to say goodbye when Leonard said, “Sorry. Not funny.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, would you like to go to the movies with me?”

She didn’t answer right away. He deserved a little punishment. And so she put the screws to him––for another three seconds.

“I’d love to.”

And there it was already, that word. She wondered if Leonard had noticed. She wondered what it meant that she had noticed. It was just a word, after all. A way of speaking.

So Madeleine believed, anyway, until she went home with Leonard the next night and stayed for three days.

Leonard had a studio apartment on the third floor of a low-rent student building. The halls were full of bikes and junk mail. Stickers decorated the other tenants’ doors: a fluorescent marijuana leaf, a silk-screen Blondie. Leonard’s door, however, was as blank as the apartment inside. In the middle of the room, a twin mattress lay beside a plastic milk crate supporting a reading lamp. There was no desk, no bookcase, not even a table, only the nasty couch, with a typewriter on another milk crate in front of it. There was nothing on the walls but bits of masking tape and, in one corner, a small portrait of Leonard, done in pencil. The drawing showed Leonard as George Washington, wearing a tricornered hat and sheltering under a blanket at Valley Forge. The caption read, “You go. I like it here.”

Madeleine thought the handwriting looked feminine.

A ficus tree endured in the corner. Leonard moved it into the sun whenever he remembered to. Madeleine, taking pity on the tree, began to water it until she caught Leonard looking at her one day, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“You’re watering my tree.”

“The soil’s dry.”

“You’re taking care of my tree.”

She stopped doing it after that.

There was a tiny kitchen where Leonard brewed and reheated the gallon of coffee he drank every day. A big greasy wok sat on the stove. The most Leonard did in the way of preparing a meal, however, was to pour Grape-Nuts into the wok. With raisins. Raisins satisfied his fruit requirement.

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 shrinklike manner came from years of seeing shrinks himself, and though one of her rules about dating was never to 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.

Going out with Leonard was like having a heavy all the time. Whenever she was with him, Leonard gave her his full attention. He didn’t stare into her eyes or smother her the way Barry had, but he made it clear that he was available. He offered little advice. Only listened, and murmured, reassuringly.

People often fell in love with their shrinks, didn’t they? That was called transference and was to be avoided. But what if you were already sleeping with your shrink? What if your shrink’s couch was already a bed?

And plus it wasn’t all heavy, the heavies. Leonard was funny. He told hilarious stories in a deadpan voice. His head sank into his shoulders, his eyes filled with rue, as his sentences drawled on. “Did I ever tell you I play an instrument? The summer my parents got divorced, they sent me to live with my grandparents in Buffalo. The people next door were Latvian, the Saulitises. And they both played the kokle. Do you know what a kokle is? It’s sort of like a zither, but Latvian.

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“Anyway, I used to hear the Saulitises playing their kokles over in the next yard. It was an amazing sound. Sort of wild and overstimulated on the one hand, but really sad on the other. The kokle is the manic-depressive of the string family. I was bored to death that summer. And I used to sit on my grandparents’ porch, listening to the Saulitises playing next door. That sound really got to me. I was sixteen. Six foot one. One hundred and thirty-eight pounds. A major reefer smoker. I used to get high in my bedroom and then I’d go out to the porch to listen. Sometimes other people came over to the Saulitises’. Other kokle players. They set up lawn chairs in the back yard and they’d all sit there playing together. It was an orchestra! A kokle orchestra! Then one day they saw me watching over the fence and invited me over. They gave me potato salad and a grape Popsicle and I asked Mr. Saulitis how you played a kokle and he started giving me lessons. I used to go over there every day. They had an old kokle they let me borrow. I used to practice five, six hours a day. I was into it.