The Marriage Plot (43 page)

“A pretty simple task, right?”

Leonard wanted to say that it would have been easier if Kilimnik hadn’t called so late, but he thought it wise to say nothing.

“Look at the numbers on these,” Kilimnik said.

He thrust out the images. Leonard obediently took them from him.

“These are the same numbers as the series you gave me
two days ago
,” Kilimnik said. “You mixed up the samples! What are you, brain-dead?”

“I’m sorry,” Leonard said. “I came over last night right after you called me.”

“And did a sloppy job,” Kilimnik shouted. “How am I supposed to run a study if my lab techs can’t follow the simplest protocols?”

Calling Leonard a “lab tech” was intended as an insult. Leonard noted it.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, futilely.

“Go,” Kilimnik said, dismissing him with a wave. “Get some beauty rest. I don’t want you screwing up anything more tonight.”

Leonard had no choice but to obey. As soon as he came out of the lab, however, he was so furious that he nearly went back in to tell Kilimnik off. Kilimnik was on his case about mixing up the samples, but the truth was that it didn’t matter much. It was abundantly clear—to Leonard, at least—that moving the HO gene to the other DNA strand wasn’t going to change the asymmetry between mother and daughter cells. There were a thousand other possible causes for that asymmetry. At the end of this experiment, two to six months from now, Kilimnik would be able to prove, definitively, that the position of the HO gene had no effect on the asymmetry of budding yeast cells and, therefore, that they were now one stalk closer to finding the needle in the haystack.

Leonard imagined saying these things to Kilimnik’s face. But he knew he would never do it. He had nowhere to go if he lost his fellowship. And he was failing, failing at the easiest tasks.

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.