The Marriage Plot (55 page)

As soon as she entered, she despaired of finding Leonard. The Grand Prix might not have begun, but the casino was packed with tourists. They were clustered around the gaming tables, better dressed than the gamblers she’d seen at the Indian casino, but with the same canine hunger on their faces. Three Saudis, wearing sunglasses, sat around the baccarat table. A six-foot-tall man with a bolo tie was throwing craps. A group of Germans, the men in Bavarian suede-collared jackets, were admiring the frescoed ceiling and stained-glass windows, speaking in trilling tones. It might have been interesting to Madeleine, at another time. But now every aristocrat or high roller was just a person in the way. She felt like shoving them aside. She felt like kicking and hurting them.

Slowly, she made her way into the center of the room, concentrating on tables where cards were being played. It began to seem less likely that Leonard was here. Maybe he’d gone out for dinner with the Swiss bankers. Maybe the best idea was to go back to the hotel and wait. She moved in farther. And there, in a maroon velvet seat at the blackjack table, was Leonard.

He’d done something to his hair—wet it, or gelled it, so that it was plastered back. And he was wearing the black cape.

His stack of chips was smaller than those of the other players. He was leaning forward with concentration, his eyes fixed on the dealer. Madeleine calculated that it would be best not to interrupt him.

Seeing him like this, wild-eyed, antiquely dressed, as slick-haired as a vampire, Madeleine realized that she’d never accepted—had never taken fully on board—the reality of Leonard’s illness. In the hospital, when Leonard was recovering from his breakdown, his behavior had been peculiar but understandable. He was like someone dazed after a car crash. This—this mania—was different. Leonard seemed like an actual crazy person, and it scared her senseless.

Maniaque
wasn’t far from wrong. What did
maniac
refer to, after all, if not to mania?

All her life she’d avoided unbalanced people. She’d stayed away from the weird kids in elementary school. She’d avoided the gloomy, suicidal girls in high school who vomited up pills. What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them? The futility of reasoning with them, certainly, but also something else, something like a fear of contagion. The casino, with its buzzing, smoke-filled air, seemed like a projection of Leonard’s mania, a howling zone full of the nightmare rich, opening their mouths to place bets or cry for alcohol. Madeleine had the urge to turn and flee. Taking one step forward would commit her to a life of doing the same. Of worrying about Leonard, of constantly keeping tabs on him, of wondering what had happened if he was a half hour late coming home. All she had to do was turn and go. No one would blame her.

And then, of course, she took the step. She came up and stood silently behind Leonard’s chair.

There were a half dozen other players around the table, all men.

She moved into his field of vision and said, “Sweetie?”

Leonard glanced sideways. He didn’t appear surprised to see her. “Hi, there,” he said, returning his focus to the cards. “Sorry for taking off like that. But I was afraid you wouldn’t let me gamble. Are you mad at me?”

“No,” Madeleine said soothingly. “I’m not mad.”

“Good. Because I’m feeling lucky tonight.” He winked at her.

“Sweetie, I need you to come with me.”

Leonard threw in an ante. Again he leaned forward, concentrating on the dealer. At the same time, he said, “I remembered the Bond flick this place is in.
Never Say Never Again.
”

The dealer dealt the first two cards.

“Hit me,” Leonard said.

The dealer dealt Leonard one more.

“Again.”

The next card broke him. The dealer scooped up Leonard’s cards and the croupier took his chips away.

“Let’s go,” Madeleine said.

Leonard leaned toward her conspiratorially. “He’s using two decks. They think I can’t handle two, but they’re wrong.”

He tossed in another ante and the cycle repeated itself. The dealer had seventeen and Leonard thought he could beat it. At thirteen, he asked for one more card, and got a jack.

The croupier swept away the last of Leonard’s chips.

“I’m out,” Leonard said.

“Let’s go, sweetie.”

He turned his glassy-eyed gaze on her. “You wouldn’t lend me some money, would you?”

“Not now.”

“For richer and for poorer,” Leonard said.

But he got up from the chair.

Madeleine led Leonard by the arm across the casino. He went willingly. Just as they were nearing the top of the stairs, however, Leonard stopped. He lifted his chin and made a curious face. In an English accent, he said, “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” Suddenly raising his arms, he wrapped himself in his cape like Dracula. Before Madeleine could react, he bolted away, flapping his cape like wings, his expression mad with delight, playful, confident.

She tried to go after him, but her heels slowed her down. Finally, she took them off, running barefoot out of the casino. But Leonard was nowhere in sight.

He didn’t come back the entire night.

He didn’t come back the next day either.

By this time she was in touch with Mark Walker at the consulate in Marseille. Through Baxter alumni connections, Alton had managed to speak personally with the American ambassador to France. Ambassador Galbraith had taken down Madeleine’s information and forwarded it to Walker, who called Madeleine to say that the authorities in Monaco, France, and Italy had all been informed about the situation and that he would be in touch as soon as he knew more. Meanwhile, Phyllida had gone straight to Newark Airport and caught a night flight for Paris. The following morning, she took a connecting flight to Monaco, arriving at Madeleine’s hotel just after noon. During the eighteen hours between the phone call and Phyllida’s entering her room, Madeleine went through a range of emotions. There were periods when she was angry with Leonard for running off, and others where she castigated herself for not recognizing sooner that something was wrong. She was furious with the Swiss bankers and, for some reason, with their girlfriends, for enticing Leonard away from the hotel. She was frantic with worry that Leonard might hurt himself, or be arrested. Sometimes she was swamped with self-pity, knowing that she would get only one real honeymoon in her life and that hers had been ruined. She thought about calling Leonard’s mother, or his sister, but she didn’t have their numbers, and she didn’t want to talk to them, anyway, because somehow she blamed them too.

And then Phyllida was there, with a bellman in tow, her clothes neat and her hair in place. Everything Madeleine hated about her mother—her imperturbable rectitude, her lack of visible emotion—was exactly what Madeleine needed at the moment. She broke down, sobbing in her mother’s lap. Phyllida responded by ordering lunch brought to the room. She waited until Madeleine had eaten a full meal before she asked the first question about what had happened. Shortly afterward, Mark Walker called with the news that a person matching Leonard’s description had been admitted, early that morning, to the Princess Grace Hospital, suffering from psychosis and minor injuries sustained in a fall. The man, who had an American accent, had been found on the beach, shirtless and shoeless, and carrying no identification. Walker offered to come from Marseille and accompany Madeleine and Phyllida to the hospital to see if this person, as seemed likely, was Leonard.

While they waited for Walker, Phyllida told Madeleine to get cleaned up and look presentable, insisting that this would make her feel more in control of herself, which in fact it did. Walker, a model of efficiency and tact, picked them up in a chauffeured consulate car. Grateful for his assistance, Madeleine did her best to appear as though she wasn’t falling apart.

The Princess Grace Hospital, renamed in tribute to the former American movie star, was where she’d died the year before, following an automobile accident. Signs of mourning were still visible in the hospital: a black garland draped over the oil portrait of the princess in the main lobby; bulletin boards covered with condolence letters from around the world. Walker introduced them to Dr. Lamartine, a lean, skull-faced psychiatrist, who explained that Leonard was presently under heavy sedation. They were administering an antipsychotic manufactured by Rhône-Poulenc and not available in the States. He had had excellent results with the drug in the past, and saw no reason why the present case would be different. The clinical results of the drug were so outstanding, in fact, that the FDA’s refusal to approve it was a mystery—or perhaps not so mysterious, he added in a tone of professional complaint, given that the drug was not American-made. At that point he seemed to remember Leonard. His physical injuries were as follows: chipped teeth, bruises to the face, a broken rib, and other minor abrasions. “He is sleeping now,” the doctor said. “You can go in and see him, but please let him sleep.”

Madeleine went in alone. Before parting the curtain around the bed, she could smell the tobacco vaporizing from Leonard’s skin. She almost expected him to be sitting up and smoking in bed, but the person she found was neither the erratic, wild Leonard nor the shaken, withdrawn one, neither manic nor depressive but merely inert, an accident victim. An intravenous tube ran into his arm. The right side of Leonard’s face was swollen; his split upper lip had been sutured, the flesh around it deep purple, beginning to crust. The doctor had told her not to wake him, but she bent over him and gently lifted his upper lip. What she saw made her gasp: both of Leonard’s front teeth had been cracked off at the root. Pink tongue glistened behind the gap.

What had happened was never entirely clear. Leonard was too out of it to remember the final thirty-six hours. From the Casino de Monte-Carlo he’d gone to the restaurant where the Swiss bankers were having dinner. He had no money, but he convinced them that he had a foolproof method of counting cards. After dinner, they took him to the Loews casino, an American place, and gave him seed money. The agreement was to split the winnings fifty-fifty. This time, either by design or by luck, Leonard did well at first. He went on a little streak. Soon he was up a thousand dollars. At that point the night grew wilder. They left the casino and visited a series of bars. The bankers’ girlfriends were still there, or maybe they had left. Or he was with another group of bankers by then. At some point, he returned to Loews. The dealer there used only a single deck. Despite his mania, or because of it, Leonard managed to count cards and keep them straight in his head. He was perhaps insufficiently secretive about what he was up to, however. After an hour, the pit boss arrived and kicked Leonard out of the casino, warning him never to come back. By this time Leonard was up nearly two thousand dollars. And it was here his memory faded out. The rest of the story Madeleine pieced together from police reports. After getting kicked out of Loews the final time, Leonard had been seen at an “establishment” in the same neighborhood. Sometime the next day, he ended up at the Hôtel de Paris with a group of people who may or may not have been the Swiss bankers. At some point, drinking in their adjoining rooms, Leonard had made a bet that he could jump from one balcony to the other next door. This was only on the second floor, fortunately. He’d taken off his shoes to do this, but didn’t make it. He slipped, hitting his cheek and mouth against the balcony railing and falling to the ground below. Bleeding, half out of his mind, he’d wandered off down the beach. At one point he’d taken off his shirt and gone for a swim. It was when he came out of the sea and tried to reenter the hotel that the police had picked him up.

The French antipsychotic was indeed a wonder drug. Within two days Leonard was lucid again. He was so full of remorse, so horrified by his behavior and his attempt to alter his medications, that he spent Madeleine’s visits either apologizing to her or mute with regret. She told him to forget about it. She said it wasn’t his fault.

For the duration of Phyllida’s time in Monaco, from the moment she arrived to the moment she left, a week later, she never once said “I told you so.” Madeleine loved her mother for this. She was surprised to see how worldly Phyllida was, how unruffled she remained when it became clear what the “establishment” Leonard had visited turned out to be. On learning this, Madeleine had been reduced to tears again. But Phyllida had said with grim humor, “If that’s the only thing you have to worry about in your marriage, you’ll be lucky.” She also said, humanely, “He wasn’t in his right mind, Maddy. You have to forget about it. Just forget it and go on.” It struck Madeleine that Phyllida was speaking from personal experience, that her parents’ marriage was more complicated than she’d ever suspected.

Phyllida’s sickroom visits were awkward, however. Phyllida and Leonard still barely knew each other. As soon as Leonard was “out of the woods,” she flew home to New Jersey to get the house ready for Madeleine and Leonard’s eventual arrival.

Madeleine stayed on at the hotel. With nothing to do but watch French television on the two stations the TV set in her room received, and determined never to set foot in the casino again, Madeleine spent hours in the Musée Océanographique. It soothed her to sit in the underwater light, watching sea creatures glide across their tanks. At first she ate alone, in the dining room of the hotel, but her presence attracted too much male attention. So she stayed in her room, ordering room service and drinking more wine than she was used to.

She felt as if she’d aged twenty years in two weeks. She was no longer a bride or even a young person.

On a clear day in May, Leonard was discharged. Once again, as she had the year before, Madeleine waited outside a hospital while a nurse brought him down in a wheelchair. They took the train back to Paris, staying at a modest hotel on the Left Bank.

On the day before they flew back to the States, Madeleine left Leonard in the room while she went out to buy him cigarettes. The summer weather was lovely, the colors of the flowers in the park so bright they hurt her eyes. Up ahead, she saw an amazing sight, a troop of schoolgirls being led by a nun. They were crossing the street, heading into the courtyard of their school. Smiling for the first time in weeks, Madeleine watched them proceed. Ludwig Bemelmans had written sequels to
Madeline
. In one, Madeline had joined a gypsy circus. In another, she’d been saved from drowning by a dog. But, despite all her adventures, Madeline had never gotten any older than eight. That was too bad. Madeleine could have used some helpful examples, further installments of the series. Madeline passing the
baccalauréat
. Madeline studying at the Sorbonne. (“And to writers like Camus, Madeline just said ‘Poo poo.’”) Madeline practicing free love, or joining a commune, or traveling to Afghanistan. Madeline taking part in the ’68 protests, throwing rocks at the police, or crying out, “Under the pavement, the beach.”