"The Marriage Plot"

[fiefoe]

The problematic love interests:

• 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 circus, with just the circus.”
• “But who says I was ever attracted to you mentally?”
• Hanna—his long, aspirational, sporadically promising yet frustrating relationship—
• And yet now, almost four years later, he could return to the moment at will (and it was surprising how often he wanted to do this), summoning all of its sensory details, the rumbling of the dryers, the pounding music next door, the linty smell of the dank basement laundry room.
• after their relationship became the intimate, unsatisfying thing it became
• Mitchell suddenly thought, “I’m going to marry this girl!” The knowledge went through him like electricity, a feeling of destiny. “Foreign words are disallowed,” Madeleine said.
• But with Dabney she wished it had been curling, she longed for it to be the model UN, anything but male modeling. This, anyway, was the authentic emotion she now identified herself as having felt.
• ... a fierce need to enfold Dabney and siphon off his strength and beauty. It was all very primitive and evolutionary and felt fantastic. The problem was that she hadn’t been able to allow herself to enjoy Dabney or even to exploit him a little, but had had to go and be a total girl about it and convince herself that she was in love with him.
• You and your flair for catching subtleties.
• Nervous guys were nervous for a reason. Up until now Leonard had seemed more the tortured type than the
  nervous type. Tortured was better.
• “Don’t forget Tolstoyanism,” Madeleine said. “My God!” Leonard said. “A noun! I’ve never even dreamed of being a noun.”
• Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood.

Maddy herself:

• Up to the last moment, Madeleine had the crazy hope that this expression of weakness might in fact be strength. It was a brilliant strategy because it lacked all strategy. It involved no games, only sincerity.
• In a hoarse voice edged with something else, a sense of peril, Madeleine said, “I love you.”
• To grow up in the age of Betty Friedan and ERA marches and Bella Abzug’s indomitable hats, to define your identity when it was being redefined, this was a freedom as great as any of the American freedoms Madeleine had read about in school.
• Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone is thereby woven out of tiny, un-avowable interdictions to infinity:
• But now that she was passionately involved, she found little to regret. To feel so much was its own justification.

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