The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [46]
“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,