The Marriage Plot (36 page)

He brought Leonard back to the car, where Rita was sitting.

“Leonard has something to tell you,” Frank said.

“What?” Leonard said.

“Don’t be smart. You know perfectly well what.”

“There aren’t any bloodstains, Mom,” Leonard said.

“And?” Frank coaxed.

“The whole floor’s brand-new. In the front. It’s new tiles.”

Rita remained straight-backed in the front seat. She was wearing sunglasses, as she always did when she went out, even in winter. Finally, she took a long sip from her “water” glass—it went everywhere with her, ice cubes jingling—and got out of the car.

“Hold my hand,” she said to Leonard. Together, without Frank, they went up the front steps and across the porch into the house. They looked at all the rooms together.

“What do you think?” Rita asked when they were finished.

“It’s a nice house, I guess.”

“It wouldn’t bother you living here?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about your sister?”

“She
wants
to move here. Dad told her what it’s like. He said she could pick out her own carpet.”

Before giving her answer, Rita demanded that Frank take her to Bryant’s for dinner. Leonard wanted to go home and play baseball but they made him come along. At Bryant’s, Frank and Rita ordered martinis, quite a few of them. Before long they were laughing and kissing, and pooh-poohing Leonard’s reluctance to eat the oysters they ordered. Rita had suddenly decided that the murder was an attraction. It gave the house a “history.” In Europe, people were used to living in houses where other people had been murdered or poisoned.

“I don’t know why you’re so scared to live there,” she chided Leonard.

“I’m not scared,” he said.

“I’ve never seen such a fuss, have you?” she asked Frank.

“No, never,” Frank said.

“I didn’t make a fuss,” Leonard said, growing frustrated. “
You
did. I don’t care where we live.”

“Oh, well, maybe we won’t bring you with us, if you keep up that attitude!”

They kept laughing and drinking, while Leonard stormed away from the table and stared into the jukebox, flipping the selections again and again.

A month later, the family moved into 133 Linden, acquiring, along with the new house, one more thing for Frank and Rita to fight about.

All of this, as Leonard later learned from his therapists, amounted to emotional abuse. Not to be made to live in a house where a murder had taken place but to be the go-between in his parents’ affairs, to be constantly asked his opinion before he was mature enough to give one, to be made to feel that he was somehow responsible for his parents’ happiness and, later, their unhappiness. Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he’d learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents’ fighting: his laziness, his over-achieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

The next seven years were chaotic. There were constant parties at the house. Some antiques dealer from Cincinnati or Charleston was always in town and needed to be entertained. Frank presided over these soggy get-togethers, refilling everyone’s drinks, the adults carousing, shrieking, women falling out of their chairs, their dresses flying up. Middle-aged men wandered into Janet’s bedroom. Leonard and Janet had to serve drinks or hors d’oeuvres at these parties. On many nights, after the guests had left and sometimes while they were still there, arguments broke out, Frank and Rita shouting at each other. In their bedrooms on separate floors, Leonard and Janet turned up their stereos to drown out the noise. The fights were about money, Frank’s failure in business, Rita’s spending. By the time Leonard turned fifteen, his parents’ marriage was over. Frank left Rita for a Belgian woman named Sara Coorevits, an antiquities dealer from Brussels whom he’d met at a show in Manhattan and, it turned out, had been having an affair with for five years. A few months later, Frank sold the shop and moved to Europe, just as he always said he would. Rita retreated to her bedroom, leaving Janet and Leonard to get themselves through high school. Six months later, with creditors circling, Rita rather heroically bestirred herself to get a job at the local YMCA, becoming in time, somewhat miraculously, a director whom all the kids loved and called “Mrs. Rita.” She often worked late. Janet and Leonard made their own dinners and then went to their rooms. And it seemed like the thing that had been murdered in the house was their family.

But this was the thought of a depressive. An
aspiring
depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being
right
, in not liking the things other kids liked: football, cheerleaders, James Taylor, red meat. A friend of his, Godfrey, was into bands like Lucifer’s Friend and Pentagram, and for a while Leonard spent a lot of time at Godfrey’s house listening to them. Since Godfrey’s parents couldn’t abide the infernal racket, Godfrey and Leonard listened with headphones. First Godfrey donned the set, lowered the needle on the record, and began to writhe in silence, indicating with his blown-away facial expressions the depth of the depravity he was being treated to. Then it was Leonard’s turn. They played songs backwards to hear the hidden satanic messages. They studied the dead-baby lyrics and putrescent cover art. In order to actually hear music at the same time, Leonard and Godfrey stole money from their parents and bought tickets to concerts at the Paramount. Waiting in line, in Portland’s constant drizzle, with a few hundred other maladjusted teens was the closest Leonard ever came to feeling part of something. They saw Nazareth, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Motordeath, a band that frankly sucked but whose shows featured naked women performing animal sacrifices. You could be a fan of darkness, a connoisseur of despair.

For a while, the Disease—which was still nameless at the time—cooed to him. It said, Come closer. It flattered Leonard that he felt
more
than most people; he was more sensitive,
deeper
. Seeing an “intense” film like
Mean Streets
would leave Leonard stricken, unable to speak, and it would take three girls putting their arms around him for an hour to bring him back. Unconsciously, he began to milk his sensitivity. He was “really depressed” in study hall or “really depressed” at some party, and before long a group would form around him, looking concerned.

He was a desultory student. Teachers labeled him “bright but unmotivated.” He blew off homework, preferring to lie on the couch and watch television. He watched
The Tonight Show
, the late movie, and the late-late movie. In the mornings he was exhausted. He fell asleep in class, reviving after school to screw around with his friends. Then he went back home, stayed up late again, watching TV, and the cycle repeated.

And
still
this wasn’t the Disease. Being depressed about the state of the world—air pollution, mass starvation, the invasion of East Timor—wasn’t the Disease. Going into the bathroom and staring at his face, noticing the ghoulish veins beneath his skin, checking out his nose pores until he was convinced that he was a hideous creature whom no girl could ever love—even this wasn’t the Disease. This was a characterological prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

Leonard suffered his first real bout of depression in the fall of his sophomore year of high school. One Thursday night, Godfrey, who’d just gotten his license, came by in his parents’ Honda and picked Leonard up. They drove around with the stereo cranked. Godfrey had gone soft on him. He insisted on listening to Steely Dan.

“This is bullshit,” Leonard said.

“No, man, you’ve got to give it a chance.”

“Let’s listen to some Sabbath.”

“I’m not into that stuff anymore.”

Leonard regarded his friend. “What’s your deal?” he said, though he knew the answer already. Godfrey’s parents were religious (not Methodist, like Leonard’s family, but people who actually read the Bible). They’d sent Godfrey to a church camp over the summer and there, amid the trees and the woodpeckers, the ministers had done their work on him. He would still drink and smoke pot but he’d given up his Judas Priest and his Motordeath. Leonard didn’t mind that, so much. He was getting sick of that stuff himself. But that didn’t mean he was going to let Godfrey off the hook.

He gestured toward the eight-track player. “This stuff is fey.”

“The musicianship’s really good on this album,” Godfrey insisted. “Donald Fagen was classically trained.”

“Let me tell you something, God-frey, if we’re going to drive around, listening to this pussy shit, I might as well drop trou and let you blow me now.”

With that, Leonard searched the glove box for something more appealing, coming up with a Big Star album of which he was quite fond.

A little before midnight, Godfrey dropped him at his house and Leonard went inside and straight to bed. When he woke up the next morning, something was the matter with him. His body ached. His limbs felt encased in cement. He didn’t want to get up, but Rita came in, barking that he was going to be late. Somehow Leonard managed to climb out of bed and get dressed. Skipping breakfast, he left the house, forgetting his backpack, and walked to Cleveland High. A storm was moving in, the light crepuscular over the dingy shop fronts and overpasses. All day, as Leonard carted his body from class to class, ominous, bruise-colored clouds massed outside the windows. Teachers kept bitching at him for not having his books. He had to borrow paper and pens from other students. Twice, he shut himself into a bathroom stall and, for no discernible reason, began to weep. Godfrey, who’d had as much to drink as Leonard had, seemed just fine. They went to lunch together but Leonard had no appetite.

“What’s the matter with you, man? Are you stoned?”

“No. I think I’m getting sick.”

At three-thirty, instead of showing up for J.V. football practice, Leonard went straight home. A sense of impending doom, of universal malevolence, pursued him the entire way. Tree limbs gesticulated menacingly in his peripheral vision. Telephone lines sagged like pythons between the poles. When he looked up at the sky, however, he was surprised to find that it was cloudless. No storm. Clear weather, the sun pouring down. He decided that there was something wrong with his eyes.

In his bedroom, he got down his medical books, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. He’d bought an entire set at a garage sale, six huge color-illustrated textbooks with deliciously gruesome titles:
Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney
,
Atlas of Diseases of the Brain
,
Atlas of Diseases of the Skin
, and so on. The medical books were what first got Leonard interested in biology. The photographs of anonymous sufferers exerted a morbid attraction for him. He liked to show particularly gross pictures to Janet to make her scream.
Atlas of Diseases of the Skin
was best for that.

Even with the lights on in his bedroom, Leonard couldn’t see that well. He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light. In
Atlas of Diseases of the Endocrine System
he came across something called a pituitary adenoma. This was a tumor, typically small, that formed in the pituitary gland, often pressing on the optic nerve. It caused blindness and altered pituitary function. This led, in turn, to “low blood pressure, fatigue, and the inability to handle difficult or stressful situations.” Too much pituitary function and you became a giant, too little and you were a nervous wreck. As impossible as it sounded, Leonard seemed to be suffering both states at once.

He closed the book and collapsed on his bed. He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

When Rita returned home that evening to find Leonard, fully dressed, in bed, she told him to get ready for dinner. When he said he wasn’t hungry she set one less place at the table. She didn’t go into his room again that night.

From his first-floor bedroom, Leonard could hear his mother and sister discussing him as they ate. Janet, not usually his supporter, asked what was wrong with him. Rita said, “Nothing. He’s just lazy.” He heard them doing the dishes, Janet going into her room after dinner and talking on the telephone.

The next morning, Rita sent Janet in to check on him. She came to the edge of his bed.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Even this little show of sympathy made Leonard want to burst into tears again. He had to struggle not to, covering his face with one arm.

“Are you faking?” Janet whispered.

“No,” he managed to get out.

“It smells in here.”

“Then leave,” Leonard said, even though he wanted her to stay, wanted more than anything for his sister to crawl in beside him like she used to do when they were little.

He heard Janet’s footsteps cross the room and go down the hall. He heard her say, “Mom, I think he’s really sick.”

“Probably he has a test he didn’t study for,” Rita said, cackling mirthlessly.

Soon they left and the house was quiet.

Leonard lay under blankets, entombed. The bad smell Janet had detected was his body rotting. His back and face were covered with zits. He needed to get up and wash himself with pHisoderm but he didn’t have the energy.

In the corner of his room was his old table hockey set, the Bruins against the Blackhawks. As a twelve-year-old Leonard had mastered the skills required to beat his older sister and all his friends. He insisted on always being the Bruins. He’d made up names for each player, one Italian, one Irish, one American Indian, and one French Canadian. He’d kept stats on each player in a notebook reserved for that purpose, with a drawing of a hockey stick and a flaming puck on the front. As he played the game, sliding the metal rods to move the players around the ice and flicking the knobs to shoot, Leonard gave a running commentary. “DiMaglio takes the puck off the glass. He passes it to McCormick. McCormick gives it to Sleeping Bear, who passes it to Lecour, who shoots AND SCORES!” On and on, in his piercing, prepubescent voice, Leonard narrated his lopsided victories, jotting down Lecour’s goals and Sleeping Bear’s assists before he forgot. He obsessed over the stats, eager to run up Lecour’s goal tally even by playing Janet, who could barely operate the controls. How Janet hated playing table hockey with Leonard! And how justified she had been, he saw now. All Leonard cared about was winning. Winning made him feel good, or at least better, about himself. It didn’t matter if the other person could play or not.