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The next thing she knew, Leonard was working out. He began using the gym, lifting weights and riding a stationary bicycle. His disposition became more cheerful. He started smiling and making jokes. He even moved more quickly, as if his limbs no longer felt so heavy.
The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure. All of a sudden, Leonard was his old self again, extroverted, energetic, charismatic, and spontaneous. One Friday evening, he told Madeleine to put on her worst clothes and some rubber boots. He led her out to the beach, carrying a bushel basket and two garden trowels. The tide was out, the exposed seabed glistening in the moonlight.
As soon as they went to bed, Leonard grabbed her by the hips and turned her onto her stomach. She knew that she shouldn’t let Leonard have sex with her after the way he’d treated her all evening. At the same time, she felt so sad and unwanted that it came as a huge relief to be touched. She was making some awful pact, one that might have consequences for her entire married life. But she couldn’t say no. She let Leonard turn her over and take her, not lovingly, from behind. She wasn’t ready and it hurt at first. Leonard paid no attention, blindly thrusting. She could have been anyone. When it was over Madeleine began to cry, at first quietly, then less quietly. She wanted Leonard to hear. But he was asleep, or pretended to be.
The temptation to ignore the previous night was great. But Madeleine didn’t want to set a bad precedent. The weight of marriage pressed down on her for the first time. She couldn’t just throw a book at Leonard and leave, as she’d done in the past.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“O.K.,” Leonard said. “How about over breakfast?”
“No. Now.”
“O.K.,” he said again, somewhat softer. He looked around the room for a place to sit, but there was none, so he remained standing.
“You were so mean to me yesterday,” Madeleine said. “First you got mad when I ordered for you. Then you acted like I wasn’t even there at dinner. You kept flirting with the waitress—”
“I wasn’t flirting with the waitress.”
“Yes, you were! You were flirting with her. And then, we came back here and you—you—you just used me like I was a piece of meat!” Saying this made her burst into tears again. Her voice had gone all squeaky and girly in a way she hated but couldn’t help. “You acted like you were … with that waitress!”
“I don’t want to be with the waitress, Madeleine. I want to be with you. I love you. I love you so much.”
These were exactly the words Madeleine wanted to hear. Her intelligence told her to distrust them, but another, weaker part of her responded with happiness.
“You can never treat me that way again,” she said, still hiccuping with sobs.
“I won’t. I never will.”
“If you ever do, that’s the end.”
He put his arms around her, pressing his face into her hair. “It’s never going to happen again,” he whispered. “I love you. I’m sorry.”
Outside, shadows were lengthening along the pavement. Madeleine stared out at the Broadway traffic, trying to stave off a rising feeling of hopelessness. She didn’t know how to cheer Leonard up anymore. Everything she tried brought the same result. She worried that Leonard would never be happy again, that he had lost the ability. Right now, when they should have been excited about the new apartment, or checking out their new neighborhood, they were sitting in a vinyl booth, avoiding each other’s eyes and not saying anything. Even worse, Madeleine knew that Leonard understood this. His suffering was sharpened by the knowledge that he was inflicting it on her. But he was unable to stop it. Meanwhile, beyond the plate-glass window, the summer evening was settling over the avenue. Men were coming home from work, their ties loosened, carrying their coats. Madeleine had lost track of the days, but from the relaxed looks on people’s faces and the happy-hour crowd spilling out of the bar on the opposite corner, she could tell it was Friday night. The sun would still be up for hours but the night—and the weekend—had officially begun.
The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they’ve forgotten to do.
didnt find this super meaningful but i just like the sound of this
She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she’d come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.
“Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.”
He had a smoker’s laugh, cracked and graveled.
“I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I’ve been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There’s no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous. It’s the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.”
cute
“I got to Minneapolis. I went back to school for a year but then I dropped out again and fell into another spiral of drugs and nonbeing. There was nothing very special about it, even to me. I was a salesperson for a while in a heavily carpeted shoestore. Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”
[...] Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn’t lifting. But then he wasn’t finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. [...]
[...] Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. [...]
ahh this is the image that dfw talks about