The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [47]
When it came to kissing, Thurston was a minimalist. He pressed his thin lips against Madeleine’s and, just as she parted her own, he moved his mouth away. It was as if he were wiping his lips on hers. This hide-and-seek was a little off-putting. But she didn’t want to be unhappy. Madeleine didn’t want things to go badly (she wanted the cleansing beer to cleanse) and so she forgot about Thurston’s mouth and started kissing him elsewhere. On his Ric Ocasek neck, his vampire-white belly, the front of his boxer shorts.
He remained silent in the midst of all this, Thurston who was so voluble in class.
It wasn’t clear to Madeleine what she was seeking when she pulled Thurston’s underpants down. She stood apart from the person doing this. Certain spring-loaded doorstops made a twanging sound when released. Madeleine felt compelled to do what she did next. The wrongness of it was immediate. It went beyond the moral, straight to the biological. Her mouth just wasn’t the organ nature had designed for this function. She felt orally overextended, like a dental patient waiting for a cast to dry. Plus, this cast wouldn’t stay still. Whose idea was this, anyway? Who was the genius who thought pleasure and choking went together? There was a better place to put Thurston, but already, influenced by physical cues—Thurston’s unfamiliar smell, the faint frog-kicking of his legs—Madeleine knew she would never allow him into that other place. So she had to go on doing what she was doing, lowering her face over Thurston as he inflated like a stent to widen the artery of her throat. Her tongue began defensive movements, became a shield against deeper penetration, her hand that of a traffic cop, signaling, Stop! Out of one eye, she saw that Thurston had propped up his head with a pillow in order to watch.
What Madeleine was seeking here, with Thurston, wasn’t Thurston at all. It was self-abasement. She wanted to demean herself, and she’d done so, though she wasn’t clear on why, except that it had to do with Leonard and how much she was suffering. Without finishing what she’d started, Madeleine lifted her head, sat back on her heels, and began to softly weep.
Thurston made no complaint. He just blinked rapidly, lying still. In case the evening could be rescued.
She awoke, the next morning, in her own bed. Lying on her stomach, with her hands behind her head, like the victim of an execution. Which might have been preferable, under the circumstances. Which might have been a big relief.
In its horror her hangover was seamless with the horror of the night before. Here, emotional turbulence achieved physiological expression: the sick vodka-soaked taste in her mouth the very flavor of regret; her nausea self-reflexive, as if she didn’t want to expel the contents of her stomach but her own personhood. Madeleine’s only comfort came from knowing that she’d remained—technically—inviolate. It would have been so much worse to have the reminder of Thurston’s come inside her, trickling, leaking out.
This thought was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell, and by the realization that it was graduation day and her parents were downstairs.
•
In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom. After his failure with Madeleine, Mitchell had spent a long, frustrating year. He spent many nights with guys in the same situation, looking through the class directory known as the Pig Book and picking out the prettiest girls. Tricia Parkinson, Cleveland, OH had big Farrah Fawcett hair. In her gingham blouse Jessica Kennison, Old Lyme, MA looked like a dream of a farmer’s daughter. Madeleine Hanna, Prettybrook, NJ had sent in a black-and-white snapshot of herself, squinting into the sun with the wind blowing her hair across her