The Marriage Plot (20 page)

“Leonard? Dr. Shieu’s on the phone for you.”

As eagerly as someone interviewing for a job, Leonard stood up. “Here goes,” he said.

“Tell the doctor what you told me,” said Henry.

When Leonard had left, they both remained silent. Finally Henry spoke.

“I’m guessing you’re Leonard’s girlfriend,” he said.

“Unclear at this point,” Madeleine replied.

“He’s in a fugue state.” Henry rotated his index finger in the air. “Just a tape loop, going around and around.”

“But you just told him he was fine.”

“Well, that’s what Leonard needs to hear.”

“You’re not a doctor, though,” she said.

“No,” Henry said. “But I
am
a psych major. Which means I’ve read a lot of Freud.” He broke into a big, awkward, flirtatious Cheshire cat grin.

“And here we are,” Madeleine tartly replied, “living in post-Freudian times.”

Henry bore this dig with something like pleasure. “If you
are
Leonard’s girlfriend,” he said, “or if you’re thinking of
becoming
Leonard’s girlfriend, or if you’re thinking of getting back together with him, my advice would be not to do that.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

“I could have sworn we just met,” Madeleine said. “And that you don’t know anything about me.”

Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, “People don’t save other people. People save themselves.”

He left her with that to think about.

The woman with the uncombed hair was staring up at the TV, tying and untying the belt of her robe. A young black woman, college-age herself, was sitting at a table with what looked to be her parents. They seemed used to the surroundings.

After a few more minutes, Leonard returned. The woman with the uncombed hair called out, “Hey, Leonard. Did you see any lunch out there?”

“I didn’t,” Leonard said. “Not yet.”

“I could use some lunch.”

“Another half hour, it’ll be here,” Leonard said helpfully.

He had the air more of a doctor than of a patient. The woman seemed to trust him. She nodded and turned away.

Leonard sat in the chair and leaned forward, jiggling his knee.

Madeleine was trying to think of something to say, but everything she thought of sounded like an attack.
How long have you been in here? Why didn’t you tell me? Is it true you were diagnosed three years ago? Why didn’t you tell me you were on medication? My roommates knew and I didn’t!

She settled on “What did the doctor say?”

“She doesn’t want to discharge me yet,” Leonard said equably, bearing up to the news. “She doesn’t want to
talk
about discharging me yet.”

“Just go along with her. Just stay here and rest. I bet you could finish your incompletes in here.”

Leonard looked from side to side, speaking softly so that no one would overhear. “That’s about all I can do. Like I said, this is a state hospital.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it’s mostly just throwing medicine at people.”

“Are you taking anything?”

He hesitated before answering. “Lithium, mostly. Which I’ve been on awhile. They’re recalibrating my dose.”

“Is it helping?”

“Some side effects, but yeah. Essentially the answer is yes.”

It was hard to tell if this was indeed so, or if Leonard wanted it to be. He seemed to be concentrating intensely on Madeleine’s face, as though it would provide him crucial information.

Abruptly he turned and regarded his reflection in the window, rubbing his cheeks.

“They only let us shave once a week,” he said. “An orderly has to be there while we do it.”

“Why?”

“Razor blades. That’s why I look like this.”

Madeleine glanced around the room to see if anyone was touching. No one was.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.

“We broke up.”

“Leonard! If I knew you were depressed, that wouldn’t have mattered.”

“The breakup was
why
I was depressed,” Leonard said.

This was news. This was, in an inappropriate but real way, good news.

“I sabotaged you and me,” Leonard said. “I see that now. I’m able to think a little more clearly now. Part of growing up in the kind of family I come from, a family of alcoholics, is that you begin to normalize disease and dysfunctionality. Disease and dysfunctionality are normal for me. What’s not normal is feeling …” He broke off. He inclined his head, his dark eyes focusing on the linoleum, as he continued: “Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you’re basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in
my
family we didn’t go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it. I go and reject it by throwing Roland Barthes in your face.”

Depression didn’t necessarily ruin a person’s looks. Only the way Leonard was moving his lips, sucking them and biting them occasionally, indicated that he was on any drugs.

“And so you left,” he continued. “You walked out. And you were right to do that, Madeleine.” Leonard looked at her now, his face full of sorrow. “I’m damaged goods,” he said.

“You are not.”

“After you left that day, I lay down on my bed and didn’t get up for a week. I just lay there thinking how I’d sabotaged the best chance I ever had to be happy in life. The best chance I ever had to be with someone smart, beautiful, and sane. The kind of person I could be a team with.” He leaned forward and gazed with intensity into Madeleine’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for being the kind of person who would do a thing like that.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Madeleine said. “You have to concentrate on feeling better.”

Leonard blinked three times in quick succession. “I’m going to be in here for at least another week,” he said. “I’m missing graduation.”

“You wouldn’t have gone, anyway.”

Here, for the first time, Leonard smiled. “You’re probably right. How was it?”

“I don’t know,” Madeleine said. “It’s going on right now.”

“Right now?” Leonard looked out the window, as if he could check. “You’re missing it?”

Madeleine nodded. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

The woman in the bathrobe who’d been lazily circling the room now zeroed in on them. Under his breath Leonard said, “Watch out for this one. She can turn on you in a second.”

The woman shuffled closer and stopped. Bending at the knees, she appraised Madeleine closely.

“What are you?” she said.

“What am I?”

“Where are your people from?”

“England,” Madeleine said. “Originally.”

“You look like Candice Bergen.”

She wheeled around to grin at Leonard. “And you’re 007!”

“Sean Connery,” Leonard said. “That’s me.”

“You look like 007 gone all to hell!” the woman said. There was an edge to her tone. Leonard and Madeleine, playing it safe, said nothing until she moved on.

The woman in the bathrobe belonged in here. Leonard, in Madeleine’s opinion, didn’t. He was here only because of his intensity. Had she known from the outset about his manic depression, his messed-up family, his shrink habit, Madeleine would never have allowed herself to get so passionately involved. But now that she was passionately involved, she found little to regret. To feel so much was its own justification.

“What about Pilgrim Lake Lab?” she said.

“I don’t know.” Leonard shook his head.

“Do they know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s not until September,” Madeleine said. “That’s a long time from now.”

The TV jabbered on its hooks and chains. Leonard sucked his upper lip in the weird new way.

Madeleine took his hand.

“I’ll still go with you, if you want,” she said.

“You will?”

“You can finish your incompletes in here. We can stay in Providence for the summer and then move out there in September.”

Leonard was quiet, taking this in.

Madeleine asked, “Do you think you can handle it? Or would it be better to just rest awhile?”

“I think I can handle it,” Leonard said. “I want to get back to work.”

They were silent, looking at each other.

Leonard leaned closer.

“‘Once the first avowal has been made,’” he said, quoting Barthes from memory, “‘“I love you” has no meaning whatever.’”

Madeleine frowned. “Are you going to start that again?”

“No, but—think about it. That means the first avowal
does
have meaning.”

Light came into Madeleine’s eyes. “I’m done then, I guess,” she said.

“Not me,” Leonard said, holding her hand. “Not me.”

Pilgrims

M
itchell and Larry reached Paris in late August after a summer of boredom and desperate employment.

At Orly, lifting his backpack from the luggage carousel, Mitchell found that his arms were sore from the inoculations he’d gotten in New York two days earlier: cholera in the right, typhus in the left. He’d felt feverish on the flight over. Their low-priority seats were in the last row, across from the malodorous lavatories. Mitchell had dozed fitfully through the long transatlantic night until the cabin lights blazed on and a flight attendant shoved a half-frozen croissant in front of his face, which he nevertheless nibbled as the huge passenger jet made its descent over the capital.

Among mostly French nationals (tourist season was drawing to a close), they boarded an un-air-conditioned bus and glided noiselessly along smooth highways into the city. Getting off near the Pont de l’Alma, they retrieved their backpacks from the undercarriage and began trudging up the brightening avenue. Larry, who spoke French, walked ahead, looking for Claire’s apartment, while Mitchell, who didn’t have a girlfriend in France or anywhere else, expended no effort in trying to get them where they were going.

Jet lag added to his slight delirium. It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body. The rising sun forced him to squint. It seemed unkind somehow. And yet, at street level, everything had been arranged to please the eye. The trees were thick with late-summer leaves. They wore iron grilles around their trunks, like aprons. The broadness of the sidewalk accommodated newspaper kiosks, dog walkers, chic ten-year-old girls on their way to the park. A sharp scent of tobacco arose from the curbside, which was the way Mitchell had thought Europe would smell, earthy, sophisticated, and unhealthy, all at once.

Mitchell hadn’t wanted to start their trip in Paris. Mitchell had wanted to go to London, where he could visit the Globe Theatre, drink Bass ale, and understand what people were saying. But Larry had found two extremely cheap tickets on a charter flight to Orly, and since their money had to last the next nine months, Mitchell didn’t see how he could refuse. He didn’t have anything against Paris, per se. At any other time, he would have jumped at the chance to go to Paris. The problem with Paris, in the present case, was that Larry’s girlfriend was doing a year abroad there and they were going to stay in her apartment.

This, too, was the cheapest option. Therefore, inarguable.

As Mitchell fiddled with the belt of his backpack, his fever spiked a half degree.

“I’m not sure if I’m getting the cholera or the typhus,” he said to Larry.

“Probably both.”

Aside from the romantic opportunities, Paris appealed to Larry because he was a Francophile. He’d spent a summer during high school working at a restaurant in Normandy, learning to speak the language and to chop vegetables. At college, his proficiency in French had won him a room in French House. The plays Larry directed at Production Workshop, the student-run theater, were inevitably by French Modernist playwrights. Since coming east to college, Mitchell had been trying to wash the Midwest off himself. Sitting around in Larry’s room, drinking the muddy espresso Larry made and hearing him talk about “the theater of the absurd,” seemed like a good way to start. With his black turtleneck and little white Keds, Larry looked like he’d just returned not from a history lecture but from the Actors Studio. He already had full-blown adult addictions to caffeine and foie gras. Unlike Mitchell’s parents, whose artistic enthusiasms ran to Ethel Merman and Andrew Wyeth, Larry’s parents, Harvey and Moira Pleshette, were devotees of high culture. Moira ran the Wave Hill visual arts program. Harvey served on the boards of the New York City Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. During the Cold War, Irina Kolnoskova, second ballerina of the Kirov Ballet, had stayed in hiding at the Pleshettes’ house, in Riverdale, after defecting. Larry, only fifteen at the time, had ferried champagne splits and graham crackers to the ballerina’s bedside, where Kolnoskova alternately wept, watched game shows, or coaxed him to massage her young, spectacularly deformed feet. For Mitchell, Larry’s stories of drunken cast parties held at their house, of stumbling on Leonard Bernstein making out with a male dancer in the upstairs hallway, or of Ben Vereen singing a song from
Pippin
at Larry’s older sister’s wedding, were as astounding as tales of meeting Joe Montana or Larry Bird would have been for another kind of boy. The Pleshettes’ refrigerator was the first place Mitchell had encountered gourmet ice cream. He still remembered the thrill of it: coming down to the kitchen one morning, the majestic Hudson visible in the window, and opening the freezer to see the small round tub of exotically named ice cream. Not a greedy half gallon, as they had at Mitchell’s house in Michigan, not cheap ice
milk
, not vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry but a flavor he had never dreamed of before, with a name as lyrical as the Berryman poems he was reading for his American poetry class: rum raisin. Ice cream that was also a drink! In a precious pint-size container. Six of these lined up next to six bags of dark French roast Zabar’s coffee. What
was
Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach?
Please tell me
, Mitchell’s face silently pleaded throughout his visits. He was in New York, the greatest city in the world. He wanted to learn everything, and Larry was the guy who could teach him.