The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [104]
“For putting up with my family. For being so nice.”
She couldn’t tell whether Leonard’s T-shirt was damp or she was. She turned her face up to his, begging for a kiss. He didn’t seem to want to, so she went up on her toes and started it herself. She tasted the faint metallic tang and pushed past it, slipping one hand under his T-shirt. She let her towel fall to the ground.
“Well, O.K. then,” Leonard said. “Is this my reward for being good?”
“This is your reward for being good,” Madeleine said.
He walked her, somewhat awkwardly, backwards into the bedroom, lowered her onto the bed, and began taking off his clothes. Madeleine lay on her back, waiting, silent. When Leonard climbed on top of her she responded, kissing him and stroking his back. She reached down and placed her hand against his penis. Its surprising hardness, after months of not being so, made it feel twice as big as Madeleine remembered. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. Leonard rose on his knees, his dark eyes hoovering up every aspect of her body. Propping himself up on one arm, he took hold of his cock, moving it in a circular fashion, almost putting it in, but not quite. For one mad instant Madeleine considered letting him. She didn’t want to break the mood. She wanted to abandon herself to risk in order to show him how much she loved him. She arched her back, guiding him in. But as Leonard pushed farther in, Madeleine thought better and said, “Hold on.”
She tried to be as quick as possible. Throwing her legs over the side of the bed, she opened the bedside table drawer and took out her diaphragm case. She removed the disk, with its rubbery smell. The spermicide tube was all crumpled up. In her haste Madeleine squeezed out too much jelly and it dripped onto her thigh. She spread her knees apart, squeezing the device into a figure eight, and inserted it deep inside her until she felt it pop open. After wiping her hand on the sheet, she rolled back to Leonard.
When he began kissing her she noticed the sour, metallic taste again, stronger than ever. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that she was no longer aroused. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they complete the act. With this in mind, she reached down to help things along, but Leonard was no longer hard. As if she hadn’t noticed, Madeleine resumed kissing him. With desperation she began to feed on Leonard’s sour mouth, trying to appear excited and to excite him in turn. But after half a minute, Leonard pulled away. He rolled heavily onto his side, facing away from her, and was silent.
A long cold moment ensued. For the first time ever, Madeleine regretted meeting Leonard. He was defective, and she wasn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it. The cruelty of this thought felt rich and sweet and Madeleine indulged in it for another minute.
But then this, too, faded away, and she felt sorry for Leonard and guilty for being so selfish. She reached over and stroked Leonard’s back. He was crying now and she tried to comfort him, saying the required things, kissing his face, telling him that she loved him, she loved him, everything was going to be fine, she loved him so much.
She curled up against him, and they both were quiet.
And then they must have fallen asleep, because when she woke again the room was dark. She got up and dressed. Putting on her peacoat, she went out of the building to the beach.
It was just after ten o’clock. The lights of the dining hall and bar were still blazing. Directly ahead of her, the quarter moon lit up shreds of clouds moving quickly over the dark bay. The wind was strong. Blowing in Madeleine’s face, it seemed personally interested in her. It had come all this way, across the continent, to deliver a message to her.
She concentrated on what the doctor at Providence Hospital had said, the one time they spoke. It often took a while to get the appropriate dosage right, she said. Side effects were typically worse at first. Given that Leonard had functioned well on lithium in the past, there was no reason he wouldn’t do so in the future.