The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [181]
Madeleine wasn’t walking so well by then, either. Their first night at the hotel, Leonard had come out of the bathroom, naked and grinning.
“Look at this thing,” he said, staring down at himself. “You could hang a coat on it.”
Indeed you could. If they needed a sure sign that Leonard was feeling better, there was none more obvious. Leonard was back in action. “I’m making up for lost time,” he said, after the third time they had sex. As good as it felt, as wonderful as it was to be properly serviced after months of going without, Madeleine noted that the clock now read 10:08 a.m. It was broad daylight outside. She kissed Leonard and begged him to please let her go to sleep.
He did, but as soon as she woke up he wanted her again. He kept telling her how beautiful her body was. He couldn’t get enough of her, not that weekend and not in the weeks that followed. Madeleine had always thought that she and Leonard had great sex, but to her amazement it got better, deepened, became both more physical and more emotional. And noisier. They said things to each other now. They kept their eyes open and left the lights on. Leonard asked Madeleine what she wanted him to do and, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t too inhibited to answer.
One night in their unit Leonard asked, “What’s your most secret sexual fantasy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. Tell.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Do you want to know mine?”
“No.”
“Tell me yours, then.”
To placate him, Madeleine thought for a moment. “This’ll sound weird, but I guess it would be to be pampered.”
“Pampered?”
“Like to be really pampered, at the hairdresser’s, getting your hair washed, getting a facial, a pedicure, a massage, and then, you know, little by little …”
“That would never have occurred to me as a fantasy,” Leonard said.
“I told you it was stupid.”
“Hey, it’s your fantasy. Stupid doesn’t apply.”
And for the next hour or so, Leonard went about fulfilling it. While Madeleine protested, he carried one of the chairs from the living room into the bedroom. He ran the bath. Under the kitchen sink he found two utility candles, brought them into the bathroom, and lit them. Tying his hair back and rolling up his sleeves, he came over as though waiting on her. In what was presumably his idea of a hairdresser’s voice—a straight hairdresser—he said, “Miss? Your bath is ready.”
Madeleine wanted to laugh. But Leonard remained serious. He led her into the candlelit bathroom. He turned his back, with professional courtesy, while she took off her clothes and got into the warm scented water. Leonard knelt beside the tub and, using a cup, began to wet her hair. By this point Madeleine was going along with it. She imagined that Leonard’s hands belonged to a handsome stranger. Exactly twice, his hands strayed to the sides of her breasts, as if testing boundaries. Madeleine thought Leonard might go further. She thought Leonard might end up in the bath, but he disappeared, returning with her terry-cloth robe. Wrapping her in it, leading her to the chair and putting her feet up, he placed a warm towel over her face and, for what seemed like the next hour (but was probably twenty minutes), he gave her a massage. He started with her shoulders, moved to her feet and calves, came up her thighs, stopping just short of her you-know-what, and started on her arms. Finally, opening her robe, and pressing harder now, as if taking charge, he rubbed moisturizer into her stomach and chest.
The towel was still over her eyes as Leonard lifted her out of the chair and onto the bed. By this point, Madeleine felt totally clean, totally desirable. The moisturizer smelled like apricots. When Leonard, naked now himself, undid the belt of her robe and opened it, when he pushed into her slowly, he was himself and not himself. He was a strange man taking possession of her and her familiar safey-safe boyfriend, all in one.
She was frightened to ask Leonard what his secret fantasy was. But in a spirit of reciprocity, a day or so later, she