The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [44]
“Don’t take the Grolsch. They’re mine.”
“I thought this was a party,” Abby said.
“Yeah, it is,” the guy said. “But everyone always brings domestic beer. I brought imported.”
Olivia rose to full Scandinavian height to cast him a withering look. “As if we even wanted beer,” she said.
She bent to look into the refrigerator herself and said with distaste, “God, it’s all beer.”
Standing up again, she looked commandingly around the room until she saw Pookie Ames, and called to her over the noise.
Pookie, who normally had an afghan scarf wrapped around her head, tonight had on a black velvet dress and diamond earrings, in which she looked absolutely at home. “Pookie, save us,” Olivia said. “We can’t drink beer.”
“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.