The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Back behind his building he smoked up the rest of his Backwoods until the foil pack was empty.

  Madeleine was sitting on the couch when he came in. She had the telephone in her lap, but wasn’t talking on it. She didn’t look up at him.

  “Hi,” Leonard said. He wanted to apologize, but doing so proved more difficult than going to the refrigerator to get a Rolling Rock. He stood in the kitchen, swigging from the green bottle.

  Madeleine remained on the couch.

  Leonard was hoping that if he ignored their earlier fight it might seem as though it hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, the phone in Madeleine’s lap suggested that she’d been speaking to someone, probably one of her girlfriends, to discuss his bad behavior. A few moments later, in fact, she broke the silence.

  “Can we talk?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You have to do something about your anger. You lost control in the car today. It was scary.”

  “I was upset,” Leonard said.

  “You were violent.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You were,” Madeleine insisted. “You scared me. I thought you were going to hit me.”

  “All I did was throw the magazine.”

  “You were in a rage.”

  She continued speaking. Her speech sounded rehearsed or, if not rehearsed, supplied with phrases that weren’t her own, phrases supplied by whomever she’d been speaking with on the phone. Madeleine was saying things about “verbal abuse” and being “hostage to another person’s moods” and having “autonomy in a relationship.”

  “I understand that you’re frustrated that Dr. Perlmann keeps giving you the runaround,” she said. “But I’m not responsible for that and you can’t keep taking it out on me. My mother thinks we have different styles of arguing. It’s important for people in a relationship to have rules about the way they argue. What’s acceptable and what’s not. But when you get out of control like that—”

  “You discussed this with your mother?” Leonard said. He gestured toward the phone. “Is that what you were just talking about?”

  Madeleine lifted the phone off her lap and set it back on the coffee table. “I talk to my mother about a lot of things.”

  “But lately mostly about me.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And what does your mother say?”

  Madeleine lowered her head. As if giving herself no time for second thoughts, she said quickly, “My mother doesn’t like you.”

  The words hit Leonard like a physical blow. It wasn’t just the content of the statement, which was bad enough. It was Madeleine’s decision to utter it. A thing like that, once said, was not easily unsaid. It would be there from now on, whenever Leonard and Phyllida were in the same room. It brought up the possibility that Madeleine didn’t expect that to happen in the future.

  “What do you mean your mother doesn’t like me?”

  “She just doesn’t.”

  “What about me?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. That’s not what we’re discussing.”

  “We’re discussing it now. Your mother doesn’t like me? She only met me once.”

  “And it didn’t go very well.”

  “When she was here? What happened?”

  “Well, for one thing, you shook hands with her.”

  “So?”

  “So, my mother’s old-fashioned. She doesn’t usually shake hands with men. If she does, she’s the one to initiate it.”

  “Sorry. I’m a little behind on my Emily Post.”

  “And the way you were dressed. The shorts and the bandanna.”

  “It gets hot in the lab,” Leonard protested.

  “I’m not justifying how my mother feels,” Madeleine said. “I’m just explaining it. You didn’t make a good first impression. That’s all.”

  Leonard could see how this might be true. At the same time, he didn’t believe that his breach of etiquette could have resulted in Phyllida’s turning so definitively against him. But there was another possibility.

  “Did you tell her I’m manic-depressive?” he asked.

  Madeleine looked at the floor. “She knows,” she said.

  “You told her!”

  “No, I didn’t. Alwyn did. She found your pills in the bathroom.”

  “Your sister went through my stuff? And I’m the one who has bad manners?”

  “I got into a huge fight with her about it,” Madeleine said.

  Leonard went to the sofa and sat next to Madeleine, taking her hands. He felt, suddenly, embarrassingly close to tears.

  “Is that why your mother doesn’t like me?” he said in a pitiful voice. “Because of my manic depression?”

  “It’s not just that. She just doesn’t think we’re right for each other.”

  “We’re great for each other!” he said, trying to smile, and looking into her eyes for confirmation.

  But Madeleine didn’t give it. Instead, she stared at their clasped hands, furrowing her brow.

  “I don’t know anymore,” she said.

  She pulled her hands away, tucking them under her arms.

  “What is it, then?” Leonard said, desperate to know. “Is it because of my family? Is it because I’m poor? Is it because I was on financial aid?”

  “It has nothing to do with that.”

  “Is your mother worried I’ll pass on my disease to our kids?”

  “Leonard, stop.”

  “Why should I stop? I want to know. You say your mother doesn’t like me but you won’t say why.”

  “She just doesn’t, that’s all.”

  She got up and took her coat off the chair. “I’m going out for a little while,” she said.

  “Now I see why you got that magazine,” Leonard said, unable to keep from sounding bitter. “You’re hoping to find a cure.”

  “What’s wrong with that? You wouldn’t like to get better?”

  “I’m sorry that I suffer from a mental disease, Madeleine. I know it’s terribly uncouth. If my parents had only brought me up better, maybe I wouldn’t be this way.”

  “That’s not fair!” Madeleine cried, flaring with real anger for the first time. She turned away, as if disgusted with him, and left the apartment.

  Leonard stood rooted to the floor. His eyes were filling, but if he kept blinking fast enough, no tears fell. As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet. So there was at least that to be grateful for. The life that was ruined wasn’t entirely his.

  He sat on the couch. Through the window he could see the night surf, the crests of waves catching the moonlight. The black water was telling him things. It was telling him that he had come from nothing and would return to nothing. He wasn’t as smart as he’d thought. He was going to fail at Pilgrim Lake. Even if he managed to hold on to his fellowship until May, he wasn’t going to be asked back. He didn’t have money for grad school, or even to rent an apartment. He didn’t know what else to do with his life. The fear he’d grown up with, the fear of not having enough money, which no amount of winning scholarships and fellowships had taken away, returned with undiminished force. Madeleine’s immunity from want, he realized now, had always been part of her attraction for him. He’d thought he didn’t care about her money until this moment, when he realized that, if she left, her money would leave with her. Leonard didn’t believe for a minute that Madeleine’s mother’s objection to him had only to do with his manic depression. The manic depression was just the more allowable of her prejudices. She couldn’t have been thrilled that, instead of being Old Money, he was just Old Portland, or that he looked to her like someone in a motorcycle gang, or that he smelled of cheap gas station cigars.

  He didn’t go after Madeleine. He had acted sufficiently
weak and desperate already. It was time now, to the extent possible, to show some backbone and power up. This he achieved by collapsing slowly sideways until he was curled fetally across the sofa.

  Leonard wasn’t thinking about Madeleine, or Phyllida, or Kilimnik. As he lay on the couch, he thought of his parents, those two planet-size beings who orbited his entire existence. And then he was off, back into the eternally recurring past. If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative. If you grew up with emotionally stunted parents, who were unhappy in their marriage and prone to visit that unhappiness on their children, you didn’t know they were doing this. It was just your life. If you had an accident, at the age of four, when you were supposed to be a big boy, and were later served a plate of feces at the dinner table—if you were told to eat it because you liked it, didn’t you, you must like it or you wouldn’t have so many accidents—you didn’t know that this wasn’t happening in the other houses in your neighborhood. If your father left your family, and disappeared, never to return, and your mother seemed to resent you, as you grew older, for being the same sex as your father, you had no one to turn to. In all these cases, the damage was done before you knew you were damaged. The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn’t fair. If you weren’t a lucky child, you didn’t know you weren’t lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

  Hard to say how much time passed as Leonard sat on the couch. But after a long while, a light came into his eyes, and he suddenly sat up. Apparently his brain was not completely useless, because he’d just had a brilliant idea. An idea of how to keep Madeleine, defeat Phyllida, and outwit Kilimnik all at once. He jumped up from the sofa. As he made his way to the bathroom he already felt five pounds lighter. It was late. It was time to take his lithium. He opened the bottle and shook out four 300-milligram pills. He was supposed to take three of them. But he took only two. He took 600 milligrams instead of his usual 900, and then he put the rest of the pills back into the bottle and replaced the lid …

  It had taken a while for anything to happen. The drug dallied coming and going. For the first ten days Leonard felt just as fat, slow, and stupid as ever. But sometime during the second week he experienced periods of mental alertness and rising spirits that felt very much like his old, best self. Using these wisely, Leonard began to jog and to work out at the gym. He lost weight. The bison hump disappeared.

  Leonard understood why psychiatrists did what they did. Their imperative, when confronted with a manic-depressive patient, was to nuke the symptoms out of existence. Given the high suicidality of manic-depressives, that was the prudent course of action. Leonard agreed with it. Where he differed was in managing the illness. Doctors counseled patience. They insisted that the body would adjust. And, to an extent, it did. After a while, you’d been on the drugs so long that you couldn’t remember what it felt like to be normal. That was how you adjusted.

  A better way to treat manic depression, it seemed to Leonard, was to find the sweet spot in the lower reaches of mania where side effects were nil and energy went through the roof. You wanted to enjoy the fruits of mania without flipping out. It was like keeping an engine operating at maximum efficiency, all pistons firing, perfect combustion generating maximum speed, without overheating or breaking down.

  What had ever happened to Dr. Feelgood? Where had he gone? Now all you got was Dr. Feel-O.K. Dr. Feel-So-So. Doctors didn’t want to push the envelope, because it was too dangerous and difficult. What was required was somebody daring, desperate, and intelligent enough to experiment with dosages outside clinical recommendations, someone, that is, like Leonard himself.

  At first, he just took fewer pills. But then, needing to reduce in smaller increments than 300 milligrams, he began cutting his pills with an X-acto blade. This worked well enough, but sometimes sent pills shooting onto the floor, where he couldn’t find them. Finally, Leonard bought a pill cutter at the P-town pharmacy. The oblong 300-milligram lithium tablets were easily halved, but less easily quartered. Leonard had to place the pill between spongy prongs inside the cutter, closing the lid to bring down the blade. When dividing a pill into fifths or sixths, Leonard had to guesstimate. He took things slowly, dropping his daily dose to 1,600 milligrams for a week and then to 1,400. Since this was what Perlmann promised to do in another six months, Leonard told himself he was just speeding things along a bit. But then he took his dose down to 1,200 milligrams. And then down to 1,000. And finally all the way down to 500.

  In a Moleskine notebook, Leonard kept a precise record of his daily dosages, along with notes on his physical and mental state throughout the day.

  Nov. 30: Morning: 600 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

  Cotton-mouth. Cotton-head. Tremor worse, if anything. Strong metal taste to saliva.

  Dec. 3: Morning: 400 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

  Good period this morning. Like a window opened in my Tower of London head and I could see out for a few minutes. Pretty out there. Although the gallows are possibly under construction.

  Tremor possibly less, too.

  Dec. 6: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

  Down four pounds. Good mental energy most of day. Tremor about the same. Not as thirsty.

  Dec. 8: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 500 mg.

  Made it through the night without having to use the bathroom.

  Alert all day. Read 150 pp. of Ballard without coming up for air.

  No dry mouth.

  Dec. 10: Morning: 200 mg. Evening: 300 mg.

  Little bit overexuberant at dinner. M. moved my wineglass out of reach, thinking I was drinking too much. Will increase doses for next two days up to 300 mg to stabilize.

  Hypothesis: Possible that kidney function not as good as Dr. P. thinks? Or that there are fluctuations? If lithium not flushed from body, can it be assumed that excess lithium remains in system, doing its evil business? If so, might this be cause of dead brain, GI trouble, torpor, etc.? Daily dose may therefore be higher, effectively, than docs think. Something to think about …

  Dec. 14: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

  Back to earth, moodwise. Also, no noticeable return of side effects. Stay on this dose a few days, then lower again.

  The notion that he was carrying on significant scientific work entered Leonard’s head so smoothly that he didn’t recognize its arrival. It was just suddenly there. He was following in the daring tradition of scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, who’d put himself into a decompression chamber to study the effects of deep-sea diving (and perforated his eardrum), or Stubbins Ffirth, who’d poured vomit from a yellow fever patient onto his own cuts to try to prove that the disease wasn’t infectious. Leonard’s high school hero, Stephen Jay Gould, had been diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma just the year before, given eight months to live. Rumors around were that Gould had devised his own experimental treatment and was doing well.

  Leonard planned to confess to Dr. Perlmann what he’d been doing as soon as he’d compiled enough data to prove his point. Meanwhile, he had to pretend he was following orders. This involved feigning side effects that had already disappeared. He also had to calculate when his medications would run out naturally, in order to refill them often enough to avoid suspicion. All of this was easy to do now that he could think clearly again.

  The problem with being Superman was that everybody else was so slow. Even at a place like Pilgrim Lake, where everyone had high IQs, the pauses in people’s speech were long enough for Leonard to drop off his laundry and return before they finished their sentences. So he finished their sentences for them. To save everyone time. If you paid attention, it was amazingly easy to predict the predicate of a sentence from its subject. Only a few conversational gambits seemed to occur to most people. They di
dn’t like it when you finished their sentences, however. Or: they liked it at first. At first, they thought it indicated a mutual understanding between the two of you. But if you did it repeatedly, they became annoyed. Which was fine, since it meant you didn’t have to waste time talking to them anymore.

  This was harder on the person you lived with. Madeleine had been complaining about how “impatient” Leonard was. His tremor may have been gone but he was always tapping his foot. Finally, just that afternoon, while helping Madeleine study for the GRE, Leonard, unhappy with the pace at which Madeleine was diagramming a logic problem, had grabbed the pen out of her hand. “This isn’t art class,” he said. “You’ll run out of time if you do it so slow. Come on.” He drew the diagram in about five seconds, before sitting back and folding his hands over his chest with a satisfied air.

  “Give me my pen,” Madeleine said, snatching it back.

  “I’m just showing you how to do it.”

  “Will you please get out of here?” Madeleine cried. “You’re being so annoying!”

  And so it was that Leonard found himself, a few minutes later, vacating the unit in order to let Madeleine study. He decided to walk into Provincetown and lose more weight. Despite the cold, he wore only a sweater, gloves, and his new winter hat, a fur hunting cap with earflaps that tied together. The winter sky was blue as he made his way out of the laboratory grounds and along Shore Road. Pilgrim Lake, not yet frozen, was full of freshwater reeds. The surrounding dunes looked comparatively tall, speckled with clumps of dune grass except for stretches of white sand near the top where the wind kept anything from growing.

  Being alone increased the volume of information bombarding him. There was no one around to distract him from it. As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. From the control tower in his head Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending; the task of coordinating their arrivals constant from the minute Leonard woke up to the minute he went to sleep. But he was an old pro by now, after two weeks at Sweet Spot International. Tracking developments on his radar screen, Leonard could bring each plane in on schedule while trading a salty remark with the controller in the next seat and eating a sandwich, making everything look easy. All part of the job.