The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [84]
How to account for this? Ken has all along insisted that, technically speaking, the result is quite impossible. To prove the point, on his next filming expedition—to the Middle East—he used some of the same stock in a similarly poor light, with completely negative results … Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying is overflowing with love, as one senses immediately on entering it. This love is luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints … I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle.
Mitchell put the book down, switching off the light and stretching out in the lumpy bed. He thought about Claire, at first angrily but soon enough erotically. He imagined going to her apartment and finding her alone, and soon she was on her knees in front of him, taking him into her mouth. Mitchell felt guilty for fantasizing about his friend’s girlfriend but not guilty enough to stop. He didn’t like what this fantasy of Claire on her knees in front of him said about him, so next he imagined himself generously going down on her, making her come like she’d never come before. At this point he came himself. He turned onto his side, dripping onto the hotel carpet.
Almost immediately, the tip of his penis felt cold and he shook it one last time and fell back into bed, desolate.
The next morning, Mitchell shouldered his pack and carried it down the stairs to the lobby, where he paid for the room and left. Breakfast was a coffee and the biscuit that came with it. His plan was to try the youth hostel again or, if need be, to spend a night on Claire’s floor. When he got to her building, however, he saw Larry sitting on the steps. His backpack was next to him. He appeared to be smoking a cigarette.
“You don’t smoke,” Mitchell said, coming up to him.
“I’m starting.” Larry puffed on the cigarette a few times, experimentally.
“Why do you have your backpack?”
Larry gave Mitchell full access to his intense blue-eyed gaze. The filterless cigarette adhered to his full lower lip.
“Claire and I broke up,” he said.
“What happened?”
“She thinks she might be into women. She’s not sure. Anyway, we’re going to be apart, so.”
“She dumped you?”
Larry winced, nearly imperceptibly. “She says she doesn’t want to be ‘exclusive.’”
Mitchell looked away to save Larry embarrassment. “Figures,” he snorted. “You’re just a sacrificial victim.”
“Of what?”
“Sexist male and all that shit.”
“I think you were the one she thought was the sexist male, Mitchell.”
Mitchell could have objected, but he didn’t. There was no need. He had his friend back.
Now their trip could finally begin.
•
On her fourteenth birthday, in November 1974, Madeleine had received a present from her older sister, Alwyn, who was away at college. The package had arrived in the mail, wrapped in psychedelic-patterned paper and sealed with red wax bearing the impressions of crescent moons and unicorns. Somehow Madeleine had known not to open the thing in front of her parents. Once she got it up to her room and was lying on her bed, she took off the wrapping paper to find a shoebox inside, its lid marked in black ink with the words “Bachelorette’s Survival Kit.” Inside, in handwriting so infinitesimal that it seemed accomplished by an awl, was the following note:
Dear Little Sis,
Now that you’re fourteen and have started HIGH school, I thought I should let you know a few things about S-E-X so you don’t get yourself, as the Father Figure would say, “in trouble.” Actually, I’m not worried about you getting in trouble at all. I just want my little sister to have some F-U-N!!! So here’s your new, handy-dandy “Bachelorette’s Survival Kit” containing everything a modern, sensuous woman needs for total fulfillment. Boyfriend not included.
Happy Birthday,
Love, Ally
Maddy was still in her school clothes.