The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [30]
“I figured we were going back to your place.”
“You did?”
“I was going to call you on it. When we got closer.”
“We’re already close.”
“I can’t come up.”
“Please.”
“No. Not tonight.”
“Hannaesque,” Leonard said. “Stubborn. Given to ironclad positions.”
“Hannarian,” Madeleine said. “Dangerous. Not to be messed with.”
“I stand warned.”
They stood looking at each other on cold, dark Planet Street. Leonard took his hands out of his pockets to tuck his long hair behind his ears.
“Maybe I’ll come up just for a minute,” Madeleine said.
“Special Days”
fête / festivity
The amorous subject experiences every meeting
with the loved being as a festival.
1. The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the promised presence is an unheard-of totality of pleasures, a banquet; I rejoice like the child laughing at the sight of the mother whose mere presence heralds and signifies a plenitude of satisfactions: I am about to have before me, and for myself, the “source of all good things.”
“I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.”
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 when 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, the way 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. We can 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 she didn’t get a urinary tract 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 at least 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 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.
But that didn’t mean she had to tell anyone. Especially Leonard.
Leonard Bankhead 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