Chapter 83

And isn't that what would have been nice? The idea that a cold Budweiser might wash away the consequences of a full night of bingeing had a certain charm to it; they had the longnecks in this bar; Thurston had fallen into this establishment for a purpose. Why stop with just one when there is that magic? After-hours was when it became necessary for two people to ask the bartender for change and peruse the jukebox choices, their heads touching as they read the song titles.

It was that time-honored moment in the evening when dancing amid the tables in the otherwise empty bar and playing "Mack the Knife," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and "Smoke on the Water" became absolutely necessary. A purifying beer could anaesthetize Madeleine from feelings of abandonment and unattractiveness and help her block out memories of Leonard. (And didn't Thurston's nuzzle soothe her even more?) At least the beer appeared to be working. They drank their remaining two Budweisers as they walked back up College Hill to Thurston's house, with Thurston smuggling them out in the pockets of his leather jacket.

Madeleine's awareness was admirably constrained to things that couldn't harm her, such as the straggly urban vegetation, the floating sidewalk, and the jingling of Thurston's jacket's chains.

She went into his room without realising there were stairs leading there.

Madeleine was aware of the etiquette once she arrived, though, and started pulling her clothing off. She attempted to kick off her shoes while lying on her back and laughingly doing so. Thurston, on the other hand, was instantly undressed, save for his underwear. He lay motionless, blending like a chameleon into his white bedding.

Thurston had a modest approach to kissing. Just as Madeleine parted her own lips to press his thin lips against hers, he pulled his mouth away. It was in the manner of wiping his lips across hers. This game of hide and seek disturbed me a little. However, she didn't want to be depressed.

Madeleine started kissing Thurston in another location since she didn't want things to go wrong (she wanted the cleaning beer to clean). On the front of his boxer shorts, his vampire-white belly, and his Ric Ocasek neck.

Despite being so talkative in class, Thurston remained mute throughout all of this.

Madeleine wondered what she was looking for when she pulled down Thurston's underwear. She kept her distance from the perpetrator.

Some spring-loaded doorstops released with a twanging sound.

Madeleine was driven to take the subsequent action. Its wrongness became apparent right away. It moved directly from the moral to the biological. Her mouth simply wasn't the organ that nature intended for this purpose. She experienced oral exhaustion, similar to a dental patient who is waiting for a cast to dry. Additionally, this cast was erratic. Regardless, whose idea was this? Who was the genius who equated enjoyment and choking? Thurston could have been placed in a better location, but Madeleine knew she would never let him go there based on physical indications like his strange odour and his mild leg frog-kicking.

She had no choice but to continue lowering her face over Thurston as he expanded like a stent to widen her throat's arteries. Her hand was that of a traffic cop, signalling "Stop" as her tongue started to move defensively to protect against further entry. Thurston had his head raised on a pillow to observe, she could see out of one eye.

It wasn't Thurston that Madeleine was looking for in this situation.

It was self-deprecation. She wanted to belittle herself, and she succeeded in doing so, though she wasn't sure why, other than the fact that Leonard was involved and she was going through a lot of pain. Madeleine raised her head, leaned back on her heels, and began to somberly cry without finishing what she had started.

Thurston said nothing negative. He didn't move, simply made a quick blink. in the event that the evening may be saved.

The following morning, she awakened in her own bed. Like a condemned prisoner, she was lying on her stomach with her hands behind her head. which, given the circumstances, may have been preferable. Which may have been extremely relieving.

Her hangover blended seamlessly with the terror of the previous night in terms of its horror. Here, emotional turmoil manifested physically: the terrible, vodka-soaked taste in her tongue was the same taste of regret; her nausea was self-reflexive, as if she didn't want to throw up her stomach's contents but rather her own identity. The only consolation for Madeleine was that she had technically remained unharmed. It would have been far worse if she had let the memory of Thurston seep inside of her and then spill out.

The doorbell ringing and the idea that it was graduation day and her parents were downstairs broke up this train of thought.

Male freshmen in college were at the bottom of the sexual food chain. After his break-up with Madeleine, Mitchell had a difficult year. He spent a lot of nights with other guys in the same circumstances, selecting the most attractive girls from the Pig Book, the student directory. Cleveland, Ohio native Tricia Parkinson had thick Farrah Fawcett hair. Jessica Kennison, of Old Lyme, Massachusetts, resembled the ideal farmer's daughter in her gingham blouse. A blackand-white photo of Madeleine Hanna from Prettybrook, New Jersey, showing her squinting into the sun with her hair flying in the wind was submitted.

The majority of guys ignored it, concentrating instead on the more prominent and well-lit beauties. Mitchell didn't point out their error to them. In order to protect his small secret about Madeleine Hanna, he mentioned Sarah Kripke of Tuxedo Park, New York.

As for Mitchell's personal image in the Pig Book, he mailed in a reproduction of a Civil War history book illustration depicting a slender-faced Lutheran priest with a white shock of hair, tiny spectacles, and a look of moral fury. This was printed over the caption Mitchell Grammaticus, Grosse Pointe, MI by the editors.

By using the elderly man's photograph instead of sending a real photo of himself, Mitchell avoided having to compete in the Pig Book's inevitable beauty pageant. It was a means of erasing his physical personality and substituting a trace of his wit.

Mitchell was heartbrokenly disappointed if he had imagined that his female peers would notice his joking photo and be attracted to him. Nobody gave it much thought. Leonard Bankhead, of Portland, Oregon, was the young man whose photo piqued female curiosity.

In a strange photo that he had sent, Bankhead was seen standing in a snowy field while sporting an absurdly tall stocking cap. Bankhead didn't appear particularly attractive or ugly to Mitchell. However, as the first semester went on, rumours about Bankhead's sexual achievements started to spread among Mitchell's habitat's areas of hardship. John Kass, who had been Bankhead's roommate in high school, asserted that Bankhead had forced his friend to move out so frequently that he had eventually applied for a single. Mitchell once observed the illustrious Bankhead at a West Quad party looking into a girl's face as though attempting a mind-meld. Mitchell was perplexed as to why women couldn't see right through Bankhead.