The Marriage Plot (53 page)

The towel was still over her eyes as Leonard lifted her out of the chair and onto the bed. By this point, Madeleine felt totally clean, totally desirable. The moisturizer smelled like apricots. When Leonard, naked now himself, undid the belt of her robe and opened it, when he pushed into her slowly, he was himself and not himself. He was a strange man taking possession of her and her familiar safey-safe boyfriend, all in one.

She was frightened to ask Leonard what his secret fantasy was. But in a spirit of reciprocity, a day or so later, she did ask. Leonard’s fantasy was the inverse of hers. He wanted a sleeping girl, a sleeping beauty. He wanted her to pretend to be asleep when he snuck in her room and climbed into bed. He wanted her to be limp and bed-warmed while he pulled off her nightclothes and to not even fully come to consciousness until he was inside her, at which point he was so excited he didn’t seem to care what she did.

“Well, that was easy,” she said afterward.

“You got off lucky. It could have been a slave-master sort of deal.”

“Right.”

“It could have involved enemas.”

“Enough!”

The spirit of exploration that now dominated their bedroom had a strong effect on Madeleine. It led her, a little while later, to confess to Leonard one night, when he wanted to repeat the hairdresser scenario, that being pampered wasn’t really her secret fantasy. Her
secret
secret fantasy was something she’d never told anyone and could barely admit to herself. It was this: whenever Madeleine masturbated (this was hard in itself to confess to) she pictured herself as a little girl, being spanked. She didn’t know why she did this. She had no memory of being spanked as a girl. Her parents hadn’t believed in spanking. And it wasn’t really a fantasy of hers; that is, she didn’t want Leonard to spank her. But, for some reason, thinking about herself as a little girl being spanked had always helped her to have an orgasm when she was touching herself.

Well, there it was: the most embarrassing thing she could tell another person. A weird thing about herself that upset her if she thought about it much, which was why she didn’t. She had no control over it, but felt guilty about it nonetheless.

Leonard didn’t see it that way. He knew what to do with this information. First, he went to the kitchen and poured Madeleine a big glass of wine. He made her drink it. Next he pulled off her clothes, turned her over on her stomach, and started having sex with her. While he did this, he spanked her, and she hated it. She kept telling him to stop. She said she didn’t like it. It was just something she
thought
about sometimes; she didn’t really want it to happen. Stop it! Now! But Leonard didn’t. He kept it up. He held Madeleine down, and spanked her again. He put his fingers in her and spanked her some more. She was furious with him now. She struggled to get up. And right then it happened. Something broke open inside her. Madeleine forgot who she was, and what was nice. She just started moaning, her face pressed into the pillow, and when she finally came she came harder than she’d ever come before, and cried out, spasms still running through her for minutes after.

She wouldn’t let him do it again. It didn’t become a habit. Whenever she thought about it later, she was scalded with shame. But the potential of doing it again was always there now. The expectation that Leonard would take over like that, and not listen to her, and do what he wanted, forcing her to admit what she really wanted—that was there now between them.

After that, they went back to regular sex, and it was even better for their time away. They did it multiple times a day, in every room of the apartment (the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen). They did it in the Saab while the engine idled. Good old straight no-frills sex, as the Creator intended. The pounds were melting off Leonard, leaving him lean again. He had so much energy, he worked out two hours at the gym at a time. Madeleine liked his new muscles. And that wasn’t all. One night, she pressed her lips to Leonard’s ear and said, as if it were news, “You are so
big
!” And it was true. Mr. Gumby was long gone. Leonard’s girth filled Madeleine up in a way that felt not only satisfying, but breathtaking. Every millimeter of movement, in or out, was perceptible along her inner sheath. She wanted him all the time. She’d never thought much about other boys’ penises, or noticed much about them, really. But Leonard’s was highly particular to her, almost a third presence in the bed. She found herself sometimes judiciously weighing it in her hand. Did it all come down to the physical, in the end? Is that what love was? Life was so unfair. Madeleine felt sorry for all the men who weren’t Leonard.

All in all, the rapid improvement, on just about every level, in Madeleine’s relationship would have been enough to explain why she accepted Leonard’s sudden proposal that December. But it was a convergence of factors that finally pushed her over the edge. The first was how helpful Leonard had been with her grad school applications. Having decided to reapply, Madeleine faced the option of retaking the GRE as well. Leonard encouraged her to do so, tutoring her in math and logic. He read over Madeleine’s writing sample (the new essay she was sending to
The Janeite Review
), flagging sections where her argument was weak. The night before the applications were due, he typed up the biographical information and addressed the envelopes. And the next day, after they dropped the applications at the Provincetown post office, Leonard threw Madeleine down on the bed, pulled off her pants, and proceeded to go down on her, despite her protestations that she needed to shower. She kept trying to wriggle free but he held her tight, saying how great she tasted, until she finally believed him. She relaxed in a profound way that wasn’t sexual so much as existential. So it was finally true: Leonard equaled maximum relaxation.

A few days later, Leonard proposed to her, and Madeleine said yes.

She kept waiting for it to seem like a bad idea. For the next month they didn’t tell anybody. At Christmas, she took Leonard home to Prettybrook, daring her parents not to like him. Christmas was always a big deal at the Hannas. They had no fewer than three trees, decorated in different themes, and gave an annual Christmas party for a hundred and fifty guests. Leonard handled these festivities with aplomb, chatting with Alton and Phyllida’s friends, joining in on the caroling, and making a good impression all around. In the following days, he proved capable of watching bowl games with Alton and, as the son of an antiques dealer, of saying intelligent things about the Thomas Fairland lithographs in the library. Snow fell the day after Christmas, and Leonard was out early, wearing his slightly absurd hunting cap, shoveling the front walks and sidewalk. Whenever Phyllida took Leonard aside, Madeleine got nervous, but nothing seemed to go amiss. That he was twenty pounds lighter than he’d been in October, and unimpeachably handsome, couldn’t fail to register on Phyllida. Madeleine kept the visit short, however, not wanting to push her luck, and they left after three days, spending New Year’s in New York before returning to Pilgrim Lake.

Two weeks later, Madeleine called to break the news of her engagement.

Clearly taken off guard, Alton and Phyllida didn’t know how to respond. They sounded profoundly surprised, and got off the phone quickly. A few days later, the letter campaign began. Separate handwritten messages arrived from Alton and Phyllida, questioning the wisdom of getting “tied down” so early. Madeleine replied to these missives, which invited further responses. In her second letter, Phyllida got more specific, repeating her warnings against marrying a manic-depressive. Alton repeated what he’d said in his first letter, while making a case for a prenuptial contract to protect Madeleine’s “future interests.” Madeleine didn’t respond, and, a few days later, a third letter from Alton arrived, in which he restated his position in less legalistic language. The only thing the letters accomplished was to reveal how powerless her parents were, like an isolated dictatorship engaged in saber rattling that couldn’t follow through on its threats.

Their final move was to engage an intermediary. Alwyn called from Beverly.

“So I hear you’re engaged,” she said.

“Are you calling to congratulate me?”

“Congratulations. Mummy is
so
pissed.”

“Thanks to you,” Madeleine said.

“She had to find out sooner or later.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Well, now she knows.” In the acoustical spillover from the earpiece, Madeleine could hear Richard crying. “She keeps calling and asking me to ‘talk some sense’ into you.”

“Is that why you’re calling?”

“No,” Alwyn said. “I told her if you want to marry him, it’s your business.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you still mad at me about the pills?” Alwyn said.

“Yes,” Madeleine said. “But I’ll get over it.”

“Are you sure you want to marry him?”

“Also yes.”

“O.K., then. It’s your funeral.”

“Hey, that’s mean!”

“I’m
joking
.”

Her parents’ official surrender, in February, only brought further conflict. Once Alton and Madeleine stopped arguing about the prenuptial agreement, and whether such a document, by its very nature, invalidated the trust any marriage needed to survive, once the document had been drawn up by Roger Pyle, Alton’s lawyer in town, and signed by both parties, Phyllida and Madeleine started arguing about the wedding itself. Madeleine wanted something small and intimate. Phyllida, aware of appearances, wanted to throw the kind of grand wedding she would have thrown had Madeleine been marrying somebody more suitable. She proposed holding a traditional wedding ceremony at their local parish, Trinity Episcopal, followed by a reception at the house. Madeleine said no. Alton then suggested an informal ceremony at the Century Club, in New York. Madeleine tentatively agreed to this. A week before the invitations were to go out, however, she and Leonard chanced upon an old mariner’s church on the outskirts of Provincetown. And it was there, in a stark, lonely space at the end of a deserted peninsula, a landscape befitting a Bergman film, that Madeleine and Leonard were married. Phyllida and Alton’s most loyal friends made the trek from Prettybrook to the Cape. Madeleine’s uncles, aunts, and cousins were there, as well as Alwyn, Blake, and Richard. Leonard’s family came, his father, and his mother and sister, all of whom seemed a lot nicer than Leonard’s descriptions. The majority of the forty-six guests were Madeleine’s and Leonard’s friends from college, who treated the ceremony less as a religious rite than as an occasion to cheer and hoot.

At the rehearsal dinner Leonard played a Latvian love song on the kokle, while Kelly Traub, whose grandparents were from Riga, sang along. He made a simple toast at the wedding banquet, alluding to his breakdown so tactfully that only those in the know got the reference, and thanking Madeleine for being his “ministering Victorian angel.” At midnight, after changing into their traveling clothes, they took a limousine to the Four Seasons in Boston, where they immediately fell asleep. The next afternoon, they left for Europe.

Looking back, Madeleine thought that she might have picked up the warning signs more quickly if she hadn’t been on her honeymoon. She was so excited to be in Paris, at the height of spring, that for the first week everything seemed perfect. They stayed at the same hotel where Phyllida and Alton had spent
their
honeymoon, a three-star place now well past its prime, staffed by white-haired waiters who carried trays at precarious angles. The hotel was thoroughly French, however. (Leonard said he saw a mouse wearing a beret.) There were no other Americans there, and it looked out on the Jardin des Plantes. Leonard had never been to Europe before. It made Madeleine happy to show Leonard around, to be more knowledgeable about something than he was.

The restaurants made him nervous. “We have four different waiters serving our table,” he said on their third night in the city, as they dined in a restaurant overlooking the Seine. “Four. I counted. One guy’s just for sweeping up bread crumbs.”

In passable Lawrenceville French, Madeleine did the ordering for both of them. The first course was vichyssoise.

After tasting it, Leonard said, “I’m guessing this is supposed to be cold.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Cold soup. New concept.”

The dinner was everything she wanted her honeymoon to be. Leonard looked so handsome, dressed in his wedding suit. Madeleine felt beautiful herself, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, her hair thick on the nape of her neck. They were both as physically perfect as they were ever going to be. They had their whole life together before them, stretching out like the lights along the river. Madeleine could already imagine telling this story to their children, the story of “The First Time Daddy Ate Cold Soup.” The wine had gone to her head. She almost said this out loud. She wasn’t ready for children! And yet here she was, already thinking about them.

They spent the next days sightseeing. To Madeleine’s surprise, Leonard was less interested in museums and churches than in the merchandise in the shop windows. He kept stopping along the Champs-Élysées to admire things he’d never shown interest in before—suits, shirts, cuff links, Hermès neckties. Wandering the narrow streets of the Marais, he stopped outside a tailor shop. In the slightly dusty window was a headless mannequin and on the mannequin was a black opera cloak. Leonard went inside to look at it.

“This is really nice,” he said, examining the satin lining.

“It’s a
cape
,” Madeleine said.

“You’d never find anything like this in the States,” Leonard said.

And he bought it, spending way too much (in her opinion) of his last monthly stipend from Pilgrim Lake. The tailor wrapped the garment up and put it in a box, and soon Leonard was carrying it out the door. The cape was an odd thing to want, no question, but it wasn’t the first strange souvenir someone had bought in Paris. Madeleine quickly forgot about it.

That night, a rainstorm swept over the city. Around two in the morning, they were awakened by water dripping from the ceiling above the bed. A call to the front desk produced a bellman with a bucket, no apology, and a vague promise about an “
ingénieur
” coming in the morning. By positioning the bucket just so, and lying head to toe, Madeleine and Leonard managed to find a position in which to stay dry, though the dripping kept them awake.