The Marriage Plot

  “Honey,” Pookie said, “there’s Veuve Clicquot!”

  “Where?”

  “In the crisper.”

  “Fabulous!” Olivia pulled out the tray and found the bottle. “Now we can celebrate!”

  Madeleine wasn’t much of a drinker. But her situation tonight called for traditional remedies. She took a plastic glass from the stack and allowed Olivia to fill it.

  “Enjoy your Grolsch,” Olivia said to the guy.

  To Abby and Madeleine, she said, “I’ll bring the bottle,” and marched away.

  Carefully, they shepherded their full champagne glasses back through the throng.

  In the living room, Abby proposed a toast. “You guys? To a great year living together!”

  The plastic glasses didn’t clink, only flexed.

  By this time, Madeleine was fairly sure that Leonard wasn’t at the party. The thought that he was somewhere else, however, at another graduation party, opened a hole in her chest. She wasn’t sure if vital fluids were leaking out or poisons being pumped in.

  On the near wall a Halloween skeleton was kneeling before a life-size cutout of Ronald Reagan, as if going down on him. Near the president’s beaming face someone had scrawled: “I’ve got a stiffy!”

  Just then the dance floor shifted, kaleidoscopically, to reveal Lollie Ames and Jenny Crispin dancing. They were putting on a show, grinding their pelvises together and feeling each other up, while also laughing and passing a joint.

  Nearby, Marc Wheeland, now officially “too hot,” pulled off his T-shirt and tucked it into his back pocket. Bare-chested, he kept on dancing, doing the beefcake, the bench press, the love muscle. The girls around him danced closer.

  Since breaking up with Leonard, Madeleine had been beset, on an almost hourly basis, by the most overpowering sexual urges. She wanted it all the time. But Wheeland’s gleaming pectorals did nothing for her. Her desires were nontransferable. They had Leonard’s name on them.

  She’d been doing her best not to seem completely pathetic. Unfortunately, her insides were beginning to betray her. Her eyes were welling. The sucking hole at her center grew larger. Quickly, she climbed the front stairs, finding the bathroom and locking the door behind her.

  For the next five minutes, Madeleine cried over the sink while the music downstairs shook the walls. The bath towels hanging on the door didn’t look clean, so she dabbed at her eyes with wadded toilet paper.

  When she’d stopped crying, Madeleine composed herself before the mirror. Her skin looked blotchy. Her breasts, of which she was normally proud, had withdrawn into themselves, as if depressed. Madeleine knew that this self-appraisal might not be accurate. A bruised ego reflected its own image. The possibility that she didn’t look quite so much like shit as she appeared to was the only thing that got her to unlock the door and come out of the bathroom.

  In a bedroom at the end of the hall, two girls with ponytails and pearl necklaces were lying across the bed. They paid no attention as Madeleine entered.

  “I thought you hated me,” the first girl said to the other. “Ever since Bologna I thought you hated me.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t hate you,” the second girl said.

  The bookshelves held the usual Kafka, the obligatory Borges, the point-scoring Musil. Just beyond, a small balcony beckoned. Madeleine walked out.

  The rain had paused. There was no moonlight, only the glow of streetlights, sickly purple. A broken kitchen chair stood before an upside-down trash can being used as a table. On the trash can lay an ashtray and a rain-soaked Vanity Fair. Vines hung shaggily down from an unseen trellis.

  Madeleine leaned over the rickety railing, looking at the lawn.

  It must have been the lover in her who wept, not the romantic. She had no desire to jump. She wasn’t like Werther. Besides, the drop was only fifteen feet.

  “Beware.” A voice suddenly spoke behind her. “You are not alone.”

  She turned. Leaning against the house, half obscured in the vines, was Thurston Meems.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked.

  Madeleine considered a moment. “You’re not exactly scary,” she said.

  Thurston accepted this good-naturedly. “Right, more like scared. Actually, I’m hiding.”

  Thurston’s eyebrows were growing in, framing his wide eyes. He was leaning on the heels of his high-tops, his hands in his pockets.

  “Do you usually come to parties to hide?” Madeleine asked.

  “Parties bring my misanthropy into focus,” Thurston said. “Why are you out here?”

  “Same reason,” Madeleine said, and surprised herself by laughing.

  To give them room, Thurston moved the trash can aside. He picked up the book, brought it close to his face to see what it was, and violently flung it off the balcony. It made a thud in the damp grass.

  “I guess you don’t like Vanity Fair,” Madeleine said.

  “‘Vanity of vanities, saith the prophet,’” Thurston said, “and all that shit.”

  A car stopped in the street, then backed up. People carrying six-packs got out and approached the house.

  “More revelers,” Thurston said, staring down at them.

  A silence ensued. Finally, Madeleine said, “So what did you do your term paper on? Derrida?”

  “Naturellement,” Thurston said. “What about you?”

  “Barthes.”

  “Which book?”

  “A Lover’s Discourse.”

  Thurston squeezed his eyes shut, nodding with pleasure. “That’s a great book.”

  “You like it?” Madeleine said.

  “The thing about that book,” Thurston said, “is that, ostensibly, it’s a deconstruction of love. It’s supposed to cast a cold eye on the whole romantic enterprise, right? But it reads like a diary.”

  “That’s what my paper’s on!” Madeleine cried. “I deconstructed Barthes’ deconstruction of love.”

  Thurston kept nodding. “I’d like to read it.”

  “You would?” Madeleine’s voice rose half an octave. She cleared her throat to bring it back down. “I don’t know if it’s any good. But maybe.”

  “Zipperstein’s sort of brain-dead, don’t you think?” Thurston said.

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “Me? No. I like semiotics, but—”

  “He never says anything!”

  “I know,” Thurston agreed. “He’s inscrutable. He’s like Harpo Marx without the horn.”

  Madeleine found herself, unexpectedly, liking Thurston. When he asked if she wanted to get a drink, she said yes. They returned to the kitchen, which was even louder and more crowded than before. The guy with the baseball cap hadn’t moved.

  “You’re going to guard your beer all night?” Madeleine asked him.

  “Whatever’s necessary,” the guy said.

  “Don’t take any of this guy’s beer,” Madeleine said to Thurston. “He’s very particular about his beer.”

  Thurston had already opened the refrigerator and was reaching inside, his leather biker’s jacket hanging open. “Which beer is yours?” he asked the guy.

  “The Grolsch,” the guy said.

  “Ah, a Grolsch man, eh?” Thurston said, moving bottles around. “Lover of the old-school, Teutonic, rubber-stopper and ceramic-cap thingy. I understand your preference for that. The thing is, I wonder if the Grolsch family ever intended for those rubber-stoppered bottles to cross the ocean. You know what I mean? I’ve had more than a few Grolsch go skunky on me. I wouldn’t drink it if you paid me.” Thurston now held up two cans of Narragansett. “These only had to travel about a mile and a half.”

  “Narragansett tastes like piss,” the guy said.

  “Well, you’d be the one to know.”

  And with that, Thurston took Madeleine away. He led her out of the kitchen and back through the front hall, motioning for her to follow him outside. When they reached the porch he opened his biker jacket to reveal two bottles of Grolsch stashed inside.
r />   “We better make a getaway,” Thurston said.

  They drank the beers while walking along Thayer Street, passing bars full of other graduating seniors. When the beers were gone they went to the Grad Center bar, and from the Grad Center bar, they went downtown, via taxi, to an old man’s bar Thurston liked. The bar had a boxing theme, black-and-white photos of Marciano and Cassius Clay on the walls, a pair of autographed Everlast gloves in a dusty case. For a while they drank vodka with healthful juices. Next Thurston got nostalgic about something called a sidecar, which he used to have on skiing trips with his father. He pulled Madeleine by the hand down the street and across the plaza into the Biltmore Hotel. There the bartender didn’t know how to make a sidecar. Thurston had to instruct him, grandly announcing, “The sidecar is the perfect winter drink. Brandy to warm the innards, and citrus to ward off colds.”

  “It isn’t winter,” Madeleine said.

  “Let’s pretend it is.”

  Sometime later, as Thurston and Madeleine were swaying down the sidewalk arm in arm, she felt him lurch sideways into yet another bar.

  “A cleansing beer is in order,” he said.

  Over the next few minutes Thurston explained his theory—but it wasn’t a theory, it was the wisdom of experience, tested and corroborated by Thurston and his Andover roommate, who, after downing vast quantities of “spirits,” bourbon, mostly, but scotch, too, gin, vodka, Southern Comfort, whatever they could get their hands on, basically, whatever they could filch from “the parental cellars,” Blue Nun, for a period, during the “Winter of Liebfraumilch,” when they had the run of a friend’s ski chalet in Stowe, and Pernod, once, because they’d heard it was the closest thing available to absinthe and they wanted to be writers and needed absinthe in the worst way—But he was getting off the point. He was allowing his fondness for digressions to run away with him. And so Thurston, hopping up on a bar stool and signaling to the bartender, explained that in each of these cases, with each and every one of these “intoxicants,” a beer or two, afterward, always lessened the severity of the murderous hangover that inevitably followed.

  “A cleansing beer,” he said again. “That’s what we need.”

  Being with Thurston wasn’t at all like being with Leonard. Being with Thurston was like being with her family. It was like being with Alton, so punctilious about his snifters, superstitious about drinking grape after grain.

  Whenever Leonard talked about his parents’ drinking, it was all about how alcoholism was a disease. But Phyllida and Alton drank a lot and seemed relatively undamaged and responsible.

  “O.K.,” Madeleine agreed. “A cleansing beer.”

  And wouldn’t that have been nice? The belief that a cold Budweiser—they had the longnecks in here; Thurston had fallen into this bar for a reason—could rinse away the effects of an entire night’s binge had a certain magic to it. Given that magic, why stop at just one? It was the after-hours time of the night when it became incumbent on two people to get change from the bartender and pore over jukebox selections, their heads touching as they read the song titles. It was that timeless part of the night when it became absolutely necessary to play “Mack the Knife” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Smoke on the Water” and to dance together among the tables in the otherwise empty bar. A cleansing beer might drown out thoughts of Leonard and anesthetize Madeleine from feelings of abandonment and unattractiveness. (And wasn’t Thurston’s nuzzling her further balm?) The beer seemed to be working, anyway. Thurston ordered two last Budweisers, sneaking them out in the pockets of his leather jacket, and they drank them as they walked back up College Hill to Thurston’s place. Madeleine’s awareness was wonderfully restricted to things that had no power to hurt her: the scraggly urban shrubs, the floating sidewalk, the jingling of the chains on Thurston’s jacket.

  She entered his room without having registered the stairs that led to it. Once there, however, Madeleine was clear about the protocol, and began taking off her clothes. She lay on her back, laughingly trying to grasp her shoes, and finally kicked them off. Thurston, by contrast, was instantaneously naked except for his underwear. He lay completely still, blending into his white sheets like a chameleon.

  When it came to kissing, Thurston was a minimalist. He pressed his thin lips against Madeleine’s and, just as she parted her own, he moved his mouth away. It was as if he were wiping his lips on hers. This hide-and-seek was a little off-putting. But she didn’t want to be unhappy. Madeleine didn’t want things to go badly (she wanted the cleansing beer to cleanse) and so she forgot about Thurston’s mouth and started kissing him elsewhere. On his Ric Ocasek neck, his vampire-white belly, the front of his boxer shorts.

  He remained silent in the midst of all this, Thurston who was so voluble in class.

  It wasn’t clear to Madeleine what she was seeking when she pulled Thurston’s underpants down. She stood apart from the person doing this. Certain spring-loaded doorstops made a twanging sound when released. Madeleine felt compelled to do what she did next. The wrongness of it was immediate. It went beyond the moral, straight to the biological. Her mouth just wasn’t the organ nature had designed for this function. She felt orally overextended, like a dental patient waiting for a cast to dry. Plus, this cast wouldn’t stay still. Whose idea was this, anyway? Who was the genius who thought pleasure and choking went together? There was a better place to put Thurston, but already, influenced by physical cues—Thurston’s unfamiliar smell, the faint frog-kicking of his legs—Madeleine knew she would never allow him into that other place. So she had to go on doing what she was doing, lowering her face over Thurston as he inflated like a stent to widen the artery of her throat. Her tongue began defensive movements, became a shield against deeper penetration, her hand that of a traffic cop, signaling, Stop! Out of one eye, she saw that Thurston had propped up his head with a pillow in order to watch.

  What Madeleine was seeking here, with Thurston, wasn’t Thurston at all. It was self-abasement. She wanted to demean herself, and she’d done so, though she wasn’t clear on why, except that it had to do with Leonard and how much she was suffering. Without finishing what she’d started, Madeleine lifted her head, sat back on her heels, and began to softly weep.

  Thurston made no complaint. He just blinked rapidly, lying still. In case the evening could be rescued.

  She awoke, the next morning, in her own bed. Lying on her stomach, with her hands behind her head, like the victim of an execution. Which might have been preferable, under the circumstances. Which might have been a big relief.

  In its horror her hangover was seamless with the horror of the night before. Here, emotional turbulence achieved physiological expression: the sick vodka-soaked taste in her mouth the very flavor of regret; her nausea self-reflexive, as if she didn’t want to expel the contents of her stomach but her own personhood. Madeleine’s only comfort came from knowing that she’d remained—technically—inviolate. It would have been so much worse to have the reminder of Thurston’s come inside her, trickling, leaking out.

  This thought was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell, and by the realization that it was graduation day and her parents were downstairs.

  •

  In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom. After his failure with Madeleine, Mitchell had spent a long, frustrating year. He spent many nights with guys in the same situation, looking through the class directory known as the Pig Book and picking out the prettiest girls. Tricia Parkinson, Cleveland, OH had big Farrah Fawcett hair. In her gingham blouse Jessica Kennison, Old Lyme, MA looked like a dream of a farmer’s daughter. Madeleine Hanna, Prettybrook, NJ had sent in a black-and-white snapshot of herself, squinting into the sun with the wind blowing her hair across her forehead. It was a casual picture, neither calculated nor conceited, but also not her best. Most guys passed right over it, focusing on the better-lit and more obvious beauties. Mitchell didn’t alert them to their mistake. He wanted to keep Madeleine Hanna h
is little secret and, to that end, pointed out Sarah Kripke, Tuxedo Park, NY.

  As for his own photograph in the Pig Book, Mitchell had mailed in a picture cut out of a Civil War history book, showing a lean-faced Lutheran minister with a white shock of hair, tiny spectacles, and an expression of moral outrage. The editors had obediently printed this above the caption Mitchell Grammaticus, Grosse Pointe, MI. Using the old man’s portrait relieved Mitchell of having to send an actual photo of himself, and of thereby entering into the beauty pageant that the Pig Book inevitably became. It was a way to erase his bodily self and replace it with a mark of his wit.

  If Mitchell had hoped that his female classmates might see his joke photo and become interested in him, he was sadly disappointed. No one paid much attention. The boy whose photograph aroused feminine interest was Leonard Bankhead, Portland, OR. Bankhead had submitted a curious photo of himself standing in a snowy field, wearing a comically tall stocking cap. To Mitchell, Bankhead didn’t look particularly handsome or unhandsome. As freshman year progressed, however, stories of Bankhead’s sexual successes began to make their way into the zones of deprivation that served as Mitchell’s habitat. John Kass, who’d gone to high school with Bankhead’s roommate, claimed that Bankhead had made his friend sleep elsewhere so often that he’d finally applied for a single. One night Mitchell saw the legendary Bankhead at a party at West Quad, staring into a girl’s face as if attempting a mind-meld. Mitchell didn’t understand why girls couldn’t see through Bankhead. He thought that his Lothario reputation would decrease his appeal, but it had the opposite effect. The more girls Bankhead slept with, the more girls wanted to sleep with him. Which made Mitchell uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about girls in the first place.

  Mercifully, freshman year finally came to an end. When Mitchell returned the following fall, there was a whole new crop of freshman girls, one of whom, a redhead from Oklahoma, became his girlfriend during spring term. He forgot about Bankhead. (Except for a reli. stu. course they were both in sophomore year, he hardly saw him for the remainder of college.) When the Oklahoman broke up with him, Mitchell went out with other girls, and slept with still others, leaving the zones of deprivation behind. Then, senior year, two months after the heating-gel incident, he heard that Madeleine had a new boyfriend and that the lucky guy was Leonard Bankhead. For two or three days Mitchell remained numb, dealing with the news and not dealing with it, until he awoke one morning swamped by such raw feelings of diminishment and hopelessness that it was as if his entire self-worth (as well as his dick) had shriveled to the size of a pea. Bankhead’s success with Madeleine revealed the truth about Mitchell. He didn’t have the goods. He hadn’t posted up the numbers. This was where he ranked. Out of contention.