The Marriage Plot (26 page)

“What am I supposed to tell her?” Madeleine had said.

“Tell her what you think. She listens to you.”

“Why doesn’t Daddy talk to her?”

“He has. It ended in a shouting match. I’m at my wit’s end, Maddy. You don’t have to do anything. Just be your sensible, reasonable self.”

Hearing that, Madeleine almost wanted to laugh. She was desperately in love with a boy who’d been hospitalized, twice, for manic depression. For the last four months, instead of focusing on her “career,” she’d been nursing Leonard back to health, cooking his meals and cleaning his clothes, calming his anxieties and cheering him out of his frequent low moods. She’d been putting up with the serious side effects brought on by his new, higher dosage of lithium. No doubt largely due to all this, Madeleine had found herself, one night at the end of August, kissing Mitchell Grammaticus outside Chumley’s on Bedford Street, kissing him and enjoying it, before fleeing back to Providence and Leonard’s sickbed. The last thing she felt herself to be was sensible or reasonable. She had just started living like a grown-up and she’d never felt more vulnerable, frightened, or confused in her life.

After she moved out of her apartment on Benefit Street, in June, Madeleine had stayed at Leonard’s place, alone, until he got out of the hospital. She felt excited to be entrusted with his things. She played his Arvo Pärt records on the stereo, lying on the couch and listening with closed eyes exactly the way Leonard did. She flipped through his books, reading his marginalia. Next to dense passages by Nietzsche or Hegel, Leonard drew faces, either smiling or frowning, or just put an “!” At night she slept in one of Leonard’s shirts. Everything in the apartment had been left exactly as it was when Leonard was taken to the hospital. There was an open notebook on the floor, in which it appeared that Leonard had been trying to figure out how long his money would hold out. The bathtub was full of newspapers. Sometimes, the emptiness of the apartment made Madeleine want to cry for all it suggested about Leonard’s aloneness in the world. Not a picture of his parents or sister anywhere. Then one morning, moving a book, she found a photograph lying underneath. It was one he’d taken of her on their first trip to the Cape, showing her lying on a motel bed, reading and eating a Klondike bar.

After three days, unable to bear the filth a minute longer, she broke down and began cleaning. At Star Market, she bought a mop, a mop bucket, a pair of rubber gloves, and an assortment of cleansers. She knew she was setting a bad precedent even while she was doing it. She mopped the floor, dumping buckets of black water down the toilet. She went through seven rolls of paper towels, wiping crud off the bathroom floor. She threw out the mildewed shower curtain and bought a new one, bright pink for revenge. She tossed everything from the refrigerator and scrubbed the shelves. After stripping Leonard’s mattress, she balled up the sheets, intending to drop them off at the corner laundry, but instead threw them in a trash can behind the building, replacing them with her own. She hung curtains in the windows and bought a paper shade for the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

A few leaves on the ficus tree were beginning to turn brown. Feeling the soil, Madeleine found it dry. She mentioned this to Leonard during visiting hours one day.

“You can water my tree,” he said.

“No way. The last time you gave me so much grief.”

“You have permission to water my tree.”

“That doesn’t sound like a request, though.”

“Will you please water my ficus tree for me?”

She watered the tree. In the afternoons, when the sun came through the front window, she pulled it into the light and misted the leaves.

Every afternoon, she went down to the hospital to see Leonard.

The doctor had adjusted Leonard’s medication, eliminating his facial tic, and this alone made him seem much improved. He talked mainly about all the drugs he was on, their uses and contraindications. Saying their names seemed to calm him, as though he were uttering incantations: lorazepam, diazepam, chlorpromazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol. Madeleine couldn’t keep them straight. She wasn’t sure if Leonard was taking these drugs or other people in the unit were. By this time he was well versed in the clinical histories of most of his fellow patients. They treated him like an intern, discussing their cases with him, asking for information about the drugs they were taking. Leonard operated in the hospital the same way he did at school. He was a font of information: the answer man. Every now and then, he had a bad day. Madeleine would enter the dayroom to find him sullen, full of despair about not having graduated and concerned about his ability to handle his duties at Pilgrim Lake: the usual list of complaints. He repeated them over and over.

Leonard hoped to stay in the hospital only a couple of weeks. But in the end he was there for twenty-two days. On the day of his release, in late June, Madeleine drove downtown to pick him up in her new car, a Saab convertible with twelve thousand miles on it. The car was a graduation present from her parents. “Even though we didn’t get to see you graduate,” Alton joked, discussing Madeleine’s disappearance that day. Among the throng of parents outside the Van Wickle gates, Alton and Phyllida had waited for Madeleine to march by; when she hadn’t, they thought they’d somehow missed her. After having searched for her on College Street, they’d tried calling her apartment, but got no answer. Finally, they stopped by and left a note for her, saying that they were worried and had decided not to go back to Prettybrook “as planned.” Instead, they were going to wait for her in the lobby of the Biltmore, which was where Madeleine found them that afternoon. She told them that she’d missed the march because Kelly Traub, with whom she’d been walking, had fallen and sprained her ankle, and she’d had to help her get to Health Services. Madeleine wasn’t sure if her parents believed her, but, relieved that she was all right, they hadn’t pressed her about it. Instead, Alton had called a few days later to instruct Madeleine to go out and buy herself a car. “Used,” he stipulated. “One or two years old. That way you escape a lot of the depreciation.” Madeleine had done as instructed, finding the convertible in the
Pro-Jo
classifieds. It was white, with fawn-colored bucket seats, and as she waited outside the hospital entrance, Madeleine put the top down so that Leonard could see her as the nurse brought him down in a wheelchair.

“Nice ride,” he said, getting in.

They hugged for a long time, Madeleine sniffling, until Leonard pulled away.

“Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of this place.”

For the rest of the summer Leonard was touchingly fragile. He spoke in the softest of tones. He watched baseball on TV, holding Madeleine’s hand.

“You know what
paradise
means?” he asked.

“It doesn’t mean ‘paradise’?”

“It means ‘walled garden.’ From the Arabic. That’s what a baseball stadium is. Especially Fenway. A walled garden. Look how green it is! It’s so soothing to just sit here and look at the field.”

“Maybe you should watch golf,” Madeleine said.

“Even greener.”

The lithium made him thirsty all the time, and sporadically nauseated. He developed a mild tremor in his right hand. During his weeks in the hospital, Leonard had gained almost fifteen pounds, and he continued putting on weight all through July and August. His face and body looked puffy and there was a roll of fat, like a buffalo’s hump, on the back of his neck. Along with his thirst, Leonard had to pee constantly. He had stomachaches and suffered bouts of diarrhea. Worst of all, the lithium made his mind feel sluggish. Leonard claimed that there was an “upper register” that he couldn’t reach anymore, intellectually. To counteract this, he chewed even more tobacco, and started smoking cigarettes as well as smelly little cigars for which he’d developed a fondness in the hospital. His clothes reeked of smoke. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and of something else, too, a metallic chemical taste. Madeleine didn’t like it.

As a result of all this, a side effect of the side effects, Leonard’s libido decreased. After making love twice or three times a day from the excitement of being reunited, they slowed down, and then nearly ceased having sex altogether. Madeleine wasn’t sure what to do. Should she pay more attention to Leonard’s problem, or less? She’d never been particularly hands-on, in bed. Life hadn’t required it. Guys hadn’t seemed to care, or to notice, being so hands-on themselves. One night, she attacked the problem as she might a drop shot on the tennis court: she ran full out, getting there seemingly in time, then bent low and flicked her return—which hit the tape and fell back, dead, on her side of the court.

She didn’t try again after that. She stayed back, playing her usual baseline game.

All of this might have bothered Madeleine more if Leonard’s neediness hadn’t appealed to her so much. There was something pleasing about having her big Saint Bernard all to herself. He didn’t want to go out even to a movie anymore. Now he was interested only in his doggy bed, his doggy bowl, and his mistress. He laid his head on her lap, wanted to be petted. He wagged his tail whenever she came in. Always so demonstrably
there
, her big fuzz buddy, her big old slobbery fuzzeroo.

Neither of them had a job. The long summer days passed slowly. With the student population gone, College Hill was somnolent and green. Leonard kept his medications in his Dopp kit under the bathroom sink. He always closed the door when taking them. Twice a week, he went to see his shrink, Bryce Ellis, and returned from these appointments emotionally abraded and exhausted. He flopped onto the mattress for another hour or two, and finally got up to put on a record.

“You know how old Einstein was when he proposed the special theory of relativity?” he asked Madeleine one day.

“How old?”

“Twenty-six.”

“So?”

“Most scientists do their best work in their early twenties. I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three. I’m in my intellectual prime right now. Except that I have to take a drug every morning and every night that makes me stupid.”

“It doesn’t make you stupid, Leonard.”

“Yes, it does.”

“It doesn’t seem very scientific to me,” she said, “to decide you’ll never be a great scientist just because you haven’t discovered anything by the time you’re twenty-two.”

“Those are the facts,” Leonard said. “Forget the drug. Even normal, I’m not remotely on a trajectory to make a scientific breakthrough.”

“Say you don’t make a breakthrough,” Madeleine said. “How do you know you won’t come up with some tiny breakthrough that ends up benefiting people? I mean, maybe you won’t figure out that space is curved. Maybe you’ll find a way to make cars run on water so there won’t be any pollution.”

“Inventing a hydrogen engine would constitute a major breakthrough,” Leonard said gloomily, lighting a cigarette.

“O.K., but not every scientist was young. What about Galileo? How old was he? What about Edison?”

“Can we not talk about this anymore?” Leonard said. “I’m getting depressed.”

This made Madeleine quiet.

Leonard took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled loudly. “Not
depressed
depressed,” he said, after a moment.

As dedicated as Madeleine was to nursing Leonard, as satisfying as it was to see him getting better, she sometimes needed to get out of the stifling studio. To escape the humidity, she went to the air-conditioned library. She played tennis with two guys from the Brown tennis team. Some days, not wanting to go back to the apartment, Madeleine walked around the empty campus, trying her best to think about herself for a few minutes. She stopped in to see Professor Saunders, only to be troubled at the sight of the elderly scholar wearing shorts and sandals. She browsed the stacks at College Hill Bookstore, virtuously selecting used copies of
Little Dorrit
and
The Vicar of Bullhampton
, which she fully intended to read. Now and then she treated herself to an ice cream cone and sat on the steps of Hospital Trust, watching other young couples going by, holding hands or kissing. She finished her ice cream and started back to the apartment, where Leonard was waiting.

All through July his condition remained delicate. By August, however, Leonard appeared to be turning the corner. Every now and then, he sounded like his old self. One morning, making toast, Leonard held up a package of Land O’Lakes butter. “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Who was the first person who noticed that the knees of the Land O’Lakes squaw look like breasts? Some guy in Terre Haute is having breakfast, and he looks at the butter package and thinks, ‘Check out those knees.’ But that’s only part of the story. After this insight, some other guy had to decide to cut out
another
pair of knees, from the back of the package, and to paste these behind the butter package the squaw’s holding in front of her chest, and then to cut around the edges of the butter package so that it flips up like she’s flashing her breasts. All this happened with no documentation whatsoever. The principals have been lost to history.”

They started leaving the apartment. One day they drove to Federal Hill to have pizza. Afterward, Leonard insisted that they go into a cheese shop. It was dark inside, the shades drawn. The smell was a presence in the room. Behind the counter, an old white-haired man was busy doing something they couldn’t see. “It’s eighty degrees out,” Leonard whispered, “and this guy won’t open the windows. That’s because he’s got a perfect bacterial mix in here and he doesn’t want to let it out. I read a paper where these chemists from Cornell identified two hundred different strains of bacteria in a tub of rennet. It’s an aerobic reaction, so whatever’s in the air affects the flavor. Italians know all that instinctively. This guy doesn’t even
know
what he knows.”

Leonard stepped up to the counter. “Vittorio, how are you?”

The old man turned and squinted. “Hello, my friend! Where you been? I haven’t seen you long time.”

“I was under the weather, Vittorio.”

“Nothing serious, I hope. Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know. I got problems of my own.”