The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Hello?”

  “What am I going to do with you, Leonard? What? Just tell me.”

  “I’m in this hospital, Mom. I’m in the psych unit.”

  “I know that, Leonard. That’s why I’m calling, for God’s sake. The doctor said you stopped taking your medicine.”

  Leonard admitted this by remaining silent.

  “What’s the matter with you, Leonard?” Rita asked.

  Anger flared in him. For a moment, it felt like old times. “Well, let’s see. First of all, my parents are alcoholics. One of them is probably manic-depressive herself, only undiagnosed. I inherited my condition from her. We both suffer from the same form of the illness. We’re not rapid cyclers. We don’t go from high to low in a few hours. We ride these long waves of mania or depression. My brain’s chemically starved for the neurotransmitters it needs to regulate my moods and then sometimes it’s oversupplied with them. I’m messed up biologically because of my genetics and psychologically because of my parents, is what’s the matter with me, Mom.”

  “And you still act like a big baby whenever you get sick,” Rita said. “I remember how you used to go on and on whenever you had a cold.”

  “This isn’t a cold.”

  “I know it isn’t,” Rita said, sounding chastened for the first time, and concerned. “It’s serious. I talked with the doctor. I’m worried about you.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “I am. I am. But Leonard, sweetheart, listen to me. You’re a grown person now. When this happened before, and they told me you were in the hospital, I rushed right out there. Didn’t I? But I can’t be rushing out there the rest of my life every time you forget to take your medicine. That’s all this is, you know. It’s you being forgetful.”

  “I was already sick,” Leonard said. “That’s why I stopped taking my lithium.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. If you’d been taking your medicine, you wouldn’t have gotten sick. Now, Leonard, sweetheart, listen to me. You’re not on my insurance anymore. Do you realize that? They took you off my policy when you turned twenty-one. Don’t worry. I’m going to pay for the hospital. I’ll do it, this time, even though I’m not swimming in money. Do you think your father’s going to help? No. I’ll do it. But when you get out, you have to get your own insurance.”

  As Leonard heard this, he felt his anxiety spike. He clutched the phone, his vision growing dark. “How am I supposed to get insurance, Mom?”

  “What do you mean, how? You graduate from college and go find a job like everybody else.”

  “I’m not going to graduate!” Leonard cried. “I’m taking three incompletes!”

  “Then complete your incompletes. You have to start taking care of yourself, Leonard. You hear me? You’re grown-up now and I can’t do it. Take your medicine so this doesn’t happen again.”

  Instead of coming to Providence herself, she dispatched his sister. Janet arrived for a weekend, flying out from San Francisco, where she’d taken a marketing job at Gump’s. She was living with some older, divorced guy who had a house in Sausalito, and she mentioned a birthday party she was missing and her demanding boss to impress on Leonard the extent of the sacrifice she was making in order to come and hold his hand. Janet seemed genuinely to believe that her problems were more significant than whatever Leonard had to deal with. “I could get depressed if I let myself,” she said. “But I don’t let myself.” She got visibly freaked out by some of the other patients in the dayroom and kept checking her watch. It was a relief when she finally left on Sunday.

  By now final exams had begun. Leonard’s stream of visitors tapered to one or two a day. He began to live for smoking breaks. In the afternoon and evening, the head nurse handed out cigarettes and other tobacco products. Chewing tobacco wasn’t allowed, so Leonard took what the other guys his age, James and Maurice, were into, these thin little moist cigars called Backwoods that came in a foil pouch. They descended in a group, accompanied by either Wendy Neuman or a security guard, to the ground floor of the hospital. On a blacktopped area surrounded by a high fence, they passed a single lighter around and torched up their smokes. The Backwoods were sweet-tasting and delivered a nice kick. Leonard puffed away, pacing back and forth and staring up at the sky. He felt like the Birdman of Alcatraz, only without any birds. As the days passed, he began to feel measurably better. Dr. Shieu attributed this improvement to the lithium kicking in. But Leonard thought it had a lot to do with good old nicotine, with going outside and watching a single cloud sail across the sky. Sometimes he heard cars honking, or kids shouting, or, once, what sounded like a fastball being cleanly clobbered on a nearby baseball diamond, a sound that soothed him instantly, the solid plonk of wood against rawhide. Leonard remembered what it felt like to be a Little Leaguer and hit a perfect pitch. That was the beginning of his recovery. Just to be able to remember that, once upon a time, happiness had been as simple as that.

  And then Madeleine appeared in the dayroom, missing graduation, and all Leonard had to do was look at her to know that he wanted to be alive again.

  There was only one problem. They wouldn’t let him out. Dr. Shieu kept playing it safe, putting off the day of Leonard’s departure. And so Leonard continued to go to group, and to draw pictures during the craft periods, and to play badminton or basketball during gym.

  In the group sessions, there was one patient who impressed Leonard deeply. Her name was Darlene Withers. She was a fireplug of a person and sat with her feet up on the folding chair, hugging her knees, always the first patient to speak up. “Hi, I’m Darlene. I’m an addict and an alcoholic and I suffer from depression. This is my third time being hospitalized for depression. Been here three weeks now, and Ms. Neuman?—I’m ready to leave anytime you say.”

  She smiled broadly. When she did, her upper lip curled back, pushing out a glistening band of its pink underside. Her family’s nickname for her was “Triple-lip.” Leonard spent a fair amount of time in group waiting to see Darlene smile.

  “I can relate to this story because the writer she say her depression come from low self-esteem,” Darlene began. “And that something I’m dealing with on a daily basis. Like lately I been feeling bad about myself because of my present relationship. I was in a committed relationship when I come into the hospital. But since I been in here? I ain’t heard from my boyfriend once. He didn’t come to visiting hours or nothing. I woke up this morning feeling real sorry for myself. ‘You too fat, Darlene. You not good-looking enough. That why he don’t come.’ But then I start thinking about my boyfriend—and you know what? His bref stink. It do! Every time that man come near me I have to smell his stanky old bref. Why I be in a relationship with someone like that, never brushes his teeth, bad oral hygiene? And the answer come back to me was: That how you feeling about yourself, Darlene. Like you worth so little you got to be with anybody take you.”

  Darlene was an inspiration in the ward. Often she sat in a corner of the dayroom singing to herself.

  “Why you singing, Triple-lip?”

  “Singing to keep from crying. You should try it too, instead of moping like you do.”

  “Who says I’m moping?”

  “Moping doesn’t cover your sorry ass! They need to come up with a whole new diagnosis for you. Prune-face disorder. That what you got.”

  According to the stories she told in group, Darlene had dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. She’d been abused by her stepfather and had left home when she was seventeen. She’d worked, briefly, as a prostitute in East Providence, a subject she was surprisingly candid about at one meeting and then never mentioned again. By the time she was twenty she was addicted to heroin and alcohol. To get off the heroin and alcohol, she’d gotten religion. “I was drugging just to dull the pain, you know? Got so doped up I didn’t know where I was. Pretty soon I lost my job, my apartment. Lost everything. My life had got to where it was unmanageable. Finally, I moved in with my sister. Now, my sister, she have this dog named Grover
. Grover a pit bull mix. Some nights, when I had came back to my sister’s apartment, I used to take Grover for a walk. Didn’t matter how late it was. When you walking a pit bull don’t nobody bother you. You come down the street and everybody like, Ho, shit! Me and Grover we had this cemetery we used to go to, because they had grass over there. And so this one night we back behind the church, and I’m drunk, as usual, and I look at Grover, and Grover look back at me, and all of a sudden he say, ‘Why you killing yourself, Darlene?’ I swear to God! I know it was just in my mind. But still, it the truth. Out of the mouth of a dog! Next day, I went to the doctor, and the doctor sent me over to Sunbeam House, and next thing I know they’re admitting me. Didn’t even let me go home first. Put me right into a room to detox. Then, when I had got myself clean, the depression hit me. Like it was just waiting for me to get off the smack and the alcohol so it could fuck me up good. Excuse my language, Ms. Neuman. I was in Sunbeam House for three months. That was two years ago. And here I am again. Things have been a little hard lately, financial problems, emotional problems. My life getting better, but it ain’t getting any easier. I just need to keep working my program in terms of my addictions and keep taking my medications in terms of my illness. One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain’t something you just get off of. You can’t get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though. That’s all I have. Thanks for listening. Peace.”

  It didn’t surprise Leonard that Darlene was religious. People without hope often were. But Darlene didn’t seem weak, credulous, or stupid. Though she often referred to her “Higher Power,” and sometimes to “my Higher Power that I choose to call God,” she seemed remarkably rational, intelligent, and nonjudgmental. When Leonard was speaking to the group, unfurling the long, tangled loop of his bullshit, he often glanced up to see Darlene listening encouragingly, as though what he was saying wasn’t bullshit, or as though, even if it was, Darlene understood his need to say it, to get it out of his system so that he could discover something true and meaningful about himself. Most of the patients with substance abuse problems had picked up the religious inclination of 12-step programs. Wendy Neuman looked like a secular humanist if Leonard ever saw one, but she never tipped her hand one way or another, as was surely right. It was clear that everybody on the unit was barely hanging on. No one wanted to say or do anything that might hinder someone’s recovery. In this way the unit was very unlike the world outside, and morally superior to it.

  To believe in God wasn’t in Leonard’s power, however. The irrationality of religious faith had been obvious to him long before reading Nietzsche had confirmed his suppositions. The only religious studies he’d taken was an oversubscribed survey course called Introduction to Eastern Religion. Leonard couldn’t remember why he’d signed up. It was the fall semester following his diagnosis the previous spring and he was taking things slow. He sat in the back of the packed lecture hall, did at least half of the reading, and showed up for section but never said anything. What he mainly remembered about the class was this guy who used to show up wearing baggy secondhand suits and beat-up shoes, sort of a drunken preacher or Tom Waits look. He carried a black briefcase with metal edges, the kind of thing that might have contained fifty thousand in cold cash instead of a paperback volume of the Upanishads edited by Mircea Eliade and a half-eaten blondie wrapped in a paper napkin. What Leonard liked about this guy was his manner of gently correcting the untutored opinions offered around the seminar table. The entire class was full of co-op types, vegetarians in overalls and tie-dyed T-shirts. The bias of these kids was that Western religion was responsible for everything bad in the world, the rape of the earth, slaughter houses, animal testing, whereas Eastern religion was ecological and pacific. Leonard had neither the desire nor the energy to argue these points, but he liked it when Young Tom Waits did. For instance, when they were discussing the concept of ahimsa, Young Waits offered the observation that the Sermon on the Mount made roughly the same point. He impressed Leonard by mentioning that Schopenhauer had tried to interest the European world in Vedantic thought back in 1814, and that the two cultures had been mixing for a long time. His point, again and again, was that truth wasn’t the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged.

  On another day, they’d gotten off topic. Somebody brought up Gandhi and how his belief in nonviolence had inspired Martin Luther King, which had led to the Civil Rights Act. The speaker’s point was that it had actually been a Hindu who had made America, a so-called Christian nation, a more just and democratic place.

  At which point Young Waits spoke up. “Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Gandhi got his philosophy of nonviolence from Tolstoy. They corresponded.”

  “Um, didn’t Tolstoy live in like the nineteenth century?”

  “He died in 1912. Gandhi used to write him fan letters. He called Tolstoy his ‘great teacher.’ So you’re right. Martin Luther King got nonviolence from Gandhi. But Gandhi got it from Tolstoy, who got it from Christianity. So Gandhian philosophy really isn’t any different from Christian pacifism.”

  “Are you saying Gandhi was a Christian?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Well, that’s wrong. Christian missionaries were always trying to convert Gandhi. But it never worked. He couldn’t accept stuff like the resurrection and the Immaculate Conception.”

  “That’s not Christianity.”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “Those are just myths that grew up around the core ideas.”

  “But Christianity is full of myths. That’s what’s so much better about Buddhism. It doesn’t force you to believe anything. You don’t even have to believe in a god.”

  Young Waits tapped his fingers on his briefcase before replying. “When the Dalai Lama dies, Tibetan Buddhists believe his spirit gets reincarnated into another baby. The monks go all over the countryside, examining all the newborns to see which one it is. They bring personal effects of the deceased Dalai Lama to dangle over the babies’ faces. Depending on how the babies react, by a secret process—which they can’t explain to anyone—they choose the new Dalai Lama. And isn’t it amazing that the right baby’s always born in Tibet, where the monks can find him, instead of, say, in San Jose? And that it’s always a boy baby?”

  At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn’t want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn’t that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. When the semester ended he forgot about Young Waits. He didn’t think about him again until two years later, after he started going out with Madeleine, when, looking through a packet of snapshots Madeleine kept in her desk, Leonard came across quite a few where Young Waits appeared. A disturbing number, in fact.

  “Who is this guy?” Leonard asked.

  “That’s Mitchell,” she said.

  “Mitchell what?”

  “Grammaticus.”

  “Yeah, Grammaticus. I was in a religious studies class with him.”

  “That figures.”

  “Did you used to go out with him?”

  “No!” Madeleine objected.

  “You look awfully cozy.” He held up a photograph where Grammaticus was lying with his curly head in her lap.

  Madeleine took the photograph, frowning, and put it back in the desk. She explained that she’d known Grammaticus since freshman year but that they’d had a fight. When Leonard asked her what the fight had been about, she looked evasive and said that it was complicated. When Leonard asked her what was complicated about it, Madeleine admitted that she and Grammaticus had always had a Platonic friendship, at least Platonic on her end, but that more recently he’d been “sort of in love” with her and that his feelings had been hurt because she ha
dn’t returned them.

  This information hadn’t bothered Leonard at the time. He had sized Grammaticus up according to an animal scale—antler size to antler size—and given himself the clear advantage. In the hospital, however, with plenty of time on his hands, Leonard began to wonder if there was more to the story. He pictured Grammaticus’s satyr-like form clambering on top of Madeleine from behind. The image of Grammaticus screwing Madeleine, or of Madeleine going down on him, contained the right mix of pain and arousal to stir Leonard from his deadened sexual state. For reasons Leonard couldn’t fathom—but that probably had to do with a need for self-abasement—the idea of Madeleine wantonly betraying him with Grammaticus turned Leonard on. To break the tedium of the hospital, he tortured himself with this twisted fantasy, jerking off in the bathroom stall while holding the lockless door closed with his free hand.

  Even after he and Madeleine got back together, Leonard kept tormenting himself in this way. On the day he was discharged, a nurse brought him outside and he got into Madeleine’s new car. Belted into the front passenger seat, he felt like a newborn that Madeleine was bringing home for the first time. The city had greened up considerably while Leonard was inside. It looked lovely and lazy. The students were gone and College Hill was deserted and peaceful. They drove back to Leonard’s apartment. They began living together. And because Leonard wasn’t a baby, because he was a full-grown sick fuck, he spent Madeleine’s every absence imagining her blowing her tennis partner in the locker room, or being bent over in the stacks of the library. One day, a week after Leonard’s return, Madeleine mentioned that she’d run into Grammaticus on the morning of graduation and that they’d made up. Grammaticus had gone back home to live with his parents but Madeleine had been talking on the phone a lot while Leonard had been in the hospital. She said she would pay for all her long-distance calls and now Leonard found himself checking the New England Bell bills for any calls made to midwestern area codes. Recently, alarmingly, she’d taken the phone into the bathroom and talked with the door closed, explaining afterward that she hadn’t wanted to disturb him. (Disturb him from what? From lying in bed, putting on weight like a calf in a veal crate? From reading the same paragraph of The Anti-Christ he’d already read three times?)