The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “This must be an old gas main,” he said.

  Madeleine looked at the bump, which had been painted over many times.

  “They used to have gas lamps in these old places,” Leonard went on. “They probably used to pump the gas up from the basement. If anybody’s pilot blew out, on any floor, you’d have a leak. Gas didn’t have an odor back then, either. They didn’t start adding methyl mercaptan until later.”

  “Good to know,” Madeleine said.

  “This place must have been a powder keg.” Leonard tapped the jutting object with his fingernail, turned, and looked Madeleine meaningfully in the face.

  “I haven’t been going to class,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Leonard’s head was way up above her, but then he bent down, in a peaceful, leaf-eater motion, and said, “I haven’t been feeling well.”

  “Were you sick?”

  “I’m better now.”

  In the living room Olivia called out, “Who wants some Delamain? It’s yummy!”

  “I want some,” Brian Weeger said. “That stuff’s killer.”

  Leonard said, “Were the dish towels all right?”

  “What?”

  “The dish towels. I bought you some dish towels.”

  “Oh, they’re great,” Madeleine said. “They’re perfect. We’ll use them! Thank you.”

  “I would have brought wine, or scotch, but that’s the kind of thing my father would do.”

  “You don’t want to do anything your father would do?”

  Leonard’s face and voice remained solemn as he replied, “My father is a depressive who self-medicates with alcohol. My mother is more or less the same.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “They’re divorced. My mother still lives in Portland, where I’m from. My dad’s in Europe. He lives in Antwerp. Last time I heard.”

  This interchange was encouraging, in a way. Leonard was sharing personal information. On the other hand, the information indicated that he had a troubled relationship with his parents, who were themselves troubled, and Madeleine made a point of going out only with guys who liked their parents.

  “What does your father do?” Leonard asked.

  Caught off guard, Madeleine hesitated. “He used to work at a college,” she said. “He’s retired.”

  “What was he? Professor?”

  “He was the president.”

  Leonard’s face twitched. “Oh.”

  “It’s just a small college. In New Jersey. It’s called Baxter.”

  Abby came in to get some glasses. Leonard helped her get them off the top shelf. When she was gone, he turned back to Madeleine and said, as if in pain, “There’s a Fellini film playing at the Cable Car this weekend. Amarcord.”

  Madeleine gazed encouragingly up at him. There were all kinds of outmoded, novelistic words to describe how she was feeling, words like aflutter. But she had her rules. One rule was that the guy had to ask her out, not the other way around.

  “I think it’s playing on Saturday,” Leonard said.

  “This Saturday?”

  “Do you like Fellini?”

  To reply to this question did not, in Madeleine’s view, compromise her rule. “You want to know something embarrassing?” she said. “I’ve never seen a Fellini film.”

  “You should see one,” Leonard said. “I’ll call you.”

  “All right.”

  “Do I have your number? Oh, right, I have it. It’s the same as Abby’s number.”

  “Do you want me to write it down?” Madeleine asked.

  “No,” Leonard said. “I have it.”

  And he rose, brontosaurus-like, to his place among the treetops.

  For the rest of the week, Madeleine stayed in every night, waiting for Leonard to call. When she came back from classes in the afternoon she interrogated her roommates to find out if he had called while she was out.

  “Some guy called yesterday,” Olivia said, on Thursday. “When I was in the shower.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Sorry, I forgot.”

  “Who was it?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did it sound like Leonard?”

  “I didn’t notice. I was dripping wet.”

  “Thanks for taking a message!”

  “Sorree,” Olivia said. “God. It was just a two-second call. He said he’d call back later.”

  And so now it was Friday night—Friday night!—and Madeleine had declined to go out with Abby and Olivia in order to stay in and wait by the phone. She was reading A Lover’s Discourse and marveling at its relevance to her life.

  Waiting

  attente / waiting

  Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns).

  … Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone is thereby woven out of tiny, unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy) …

  She could hear the television going in the apartment below. Madeleine’s bedroom faced the State Capitol dome, brightly lit against the dark sky. The heat, which they couldn’t control, was still on, the radiator wastefully knocking and hissing.

  The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

  The telephone rang.

  Madeleine sat up in bed. She dog-eared the page she was reading. She waited as long as she could (three rings) before answering.

  “Hello?”

  “Maddy?”

  It was Alton, calling from Prettybrook.

  “Oh. Hi, Daddy.”

  “Don’t sound so excited.”

  “I’m studying.”

  In his usual way, without niceties, he got to the matter at hand. “Your mother and I were just discussing graduation plans.”

  For a moment, Madeleine thought Alton meant that they were discussing her future. But then she realized it was just logistics.

  “It’s April,” she said. “Graduation’s not until June.”

  “My experience with college towns is that the hotels get booked up months in advance. So we have to decide what we’re doing. Now, here are the options. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” Madeleine said, and began, at that instant, to tune out. She stuck the spoon back into the peanut butter jar and brought it to her mouth, this time just licking it.

  In the phone Alton’s voice was saying, “Option one: Your mother and I come up the night before the ceremony, stay in a hotel, and we see you for dinner the night of graduation. Option two: We come up the morning of the ceremony, have breakfast with you, and then leave after the ceremony. Both proposals are acceptable to us. It’s your choice. But let me explain the pros and cons of each scenario.”

  Madeleine was about to answer when Phyllida spoke up on another extension.

  “Hi, dear. I hope we didn’t wake you.”

  “We didn’t wake her,” Alton barked. “Eleven o’clock’s not late at college. Especially on a Friday night. Hey, what are you doing in on a Friday night? Got a pimple?”

  “Hi, Mummy,” Madeleine said, ignoring him.

  “Maddy, sweetie, we’re redoing your bedroom and I wanted to ask you—”

  “You’re redoing my bedroom?”

  “Yes, it needs freshening up. I—”

  “My room?”

  “Yes. I was thinking about recarpeting it in green. You know, a good green.”

  “No!” Madeleine cried.

  “Maddy, we’ve kept your room the way it is for four years now—you’d think it was a shrine! I’d like to be able to use it as a guest room, occasionally, because of the en suite bathroom. You can still have it when you come
home, don’t worry. It’ll always be your room.”

  “What about my wallpaper?”

  “It’s old. It’s peeling.”

  “You can’t change my wallpaper!”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll leave the wallpaper alone. But the carpet—”

  “Excuse me,” Alton said in a peremptory tone. “This call is about graduation. Phyl, you’re hijacking my agenda. You two sort out the redecorating some other time. Now, Maddy, let me go over the pros and cons. When your cousin graduated from Williams, we all had dinner after the ceremony. And, if you’ll remember, Doats complained the whole time that he was missing all the parties—and he left halfway through the meal. Now, your mother and I are willing to stay the night—or two nights—if we’re going to see you. But if you’re going to be busy, maybe the breakfast option makes more sense.”

  “Graduation’s two months away. I don’t even know what’s happening yet.”

  “That’s what I told your father,” Phyllida said.

  It occurred to Madeleine that she was tying up the line.

  “Let me think about it,” she said abruptly. “I have to go. I’m studying.”

  “If we’re going to stay the night,” Alton repeated, “I’d like to make reservations soon.”

  “Call me later. Let me think about it. Call me Sunday.”

  Alton was still speaking when she hung up, so when the phone rang again, twenty seconds later, Madeleine picked up and said, “Daddy, stop it. We don’t have to decide tonight.”

  There was silence on the line. And then a male voice said, “You don’t have to call me Daddy.”

  “Oh, God. Leonard? Sorry! I thought you were my father. He’s freaking out about graduation plans already.”

  “I was just having a little freak-out myself.”

  “About what?”

  “About calling you.”

  This was good. Madeleine ran a finger along her lower lip. She said, “Have you calmed down or do you want to call back later?”

  “I’m resting comfortably now, thank you.”

  Madeleine waited for more. None came. “Are you calling for a reason?” she asked.

  “Yes. That Fellini film? I was hoping you might, if you’re not too, I know it’s bad manners calling so late, but I was at the lab.”

  Leonard did sound a little nervous. That wasn’t good. Madeleine didn’t like nervous guys. Nervous guys were nervous for a reason. Up until now Leonard had seemed more the tortured type than the nervous type. Tortured was better.

  “I don’t think that was a complete sentence,” she said.

  “What did I leave out?” Leonard asked.

  “How about, ‘Would you like to come with me?’”

  “I’d be happy to,” Leonard said.

  Madeleine frowned into the receiver. She had a feeling that Leonard had set up this exchange, like a chess player thinking eight moves ahead. She was going to complain when Leonard said, “Sorry. Not funny.” He comically cleared his throat. “Listen, would you like to go to the movies with me?”

  She didn’t answer right away. He deserved a little punishment. And so she put the screws to him—for another three seconds.

  “I’d love to.”

  And there it was already, that word. She wondered if Leonard had noticed. She wondered what it meant that she had noticed. It was just a word, after all. A way of speaking.

  The next night, Saturday, the fickle weather turned cold again. Madeleine was chilled in her brown suede jacket as she walked to the restaurant where they’d agreed to meet. Afterward, they made their way to the Cable Car and found a sagging couch among the other mismatched sofas and armchairs that furnished the art-house cinema.

  She had a hard time following the movie. The narrative cues weren’t as crisp as those of Hollywood, and the film had a dream-like quality, lush but discontinuous. The audience, being a college audience, laughed knowingly during the risqué European moments: when the huge-titted woman stuffed her huge tit into the young hero’s mouth; or when the old man up in the tree cried out, “I want a woman!” Fellini’s theme appeared to be the same as Roland Barthes’—love—but here it was Italian and all about the body instead of French and all about the mind. She wondered if Leonard had known what Amarcord was going to be about. She wondered if it was his way of getting her in the mood. As it so happened, she was in the mood, but no thanks to the movie. The movie was pretty to look at but confused her and made her feel naïve and suburban. It seemed both overly indulgent and overly male.

  After it was over, they made their way out onto South Main. They had no stated destination. Madeleine was pleased to realize that Leonard, though tall, wasn’t too tall. If she wore heels, the top of her head came up higher than his shoulders, almost to his chin.

  “What did you think?” he said.

  “Well, at least now I know what Felliniesque is.”

  The downtown skyline was on their left, across the river, the spire of the Superman building visible against the unnaturally pink city sky. The streets were empty except for other people leaving the cinema.

  “My goal in life is to become an adjective,” Leonard said. “People would go around saying, ‘That was so Bankheadian.’ Or, ‘A little too Bankheadian for my taste.’”

  “Bankheadian has a ring,” Madeleine said.

  “It’s better than Bankheadesque.”

  “Or Bankheadish.”

  “Ish is terrible all around. There’s Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian. But ish? Who is there who’s an ish?”

  “Thomas Mannish?”

  “Kafkaesque,” Leonard said. “Pynchonesque! See, Pynchon’s already an adjective. Gaddis. What would Gaddis be? Gaddisesque? Gaddisy?”

  “You can’t really do it with Gaddis,” Madeleine said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “Tough luck for Gaddis. Do you like him?”

  “I read a little of The Recognitions,” Madeleine said.

  They turned up Planet Street, climbing the slope.

  “Bellovian,” Leonard said. “It’s extra nice when they change the spelling slightly. Nabokovian already has the v. So does Chekhovian. The Russians have it made. Tolstoyan! That guy was an adjective waiting to happen.”

  “Don’t forget Tolstoyanism,” Madeleine said.

  “My God!” Leonard said. “A noun! I’ve never even dreamed of being a noun.”

  “What would Bankheadian mean?”

  Leonard thought for a second. “‘Of or related to Leonard Bankhead (American, born 1959), characterized by excessive introspection or worry. Gloomy, depressive. See basket case.’”

  Madeleine was laughing. Leonard stopped walking and took hold of her arm, looking at her seriously.

  “I’m taking you to my place,” he said.

  “What?”

  “All this time we’ve been walking? I’ve been leading you back to my place. This is how I do it, apparently. It’s shameful. Shameful. I don’t want it to be like that. Not with you. So I’m telling you.”

  “I figured we were going back to your place.”

  “You did?”

  “I was going to call you on it. When we got closer.”

  “We’re already close.”

  “I can’t come up.”

  “Please.”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  “Hannaesque,” Leonard said. “Stubborn. Given to ironclad positions.”

  “Hannarian,” Madeleine said. “Dangerous. Not to be messed with.”

  “I stand warned.”

  They stood looking at each other on cold, dark Planet Street. Leonard took his hands out of his pockets to tuck his long hair behind his ears.

  “Maybe I’ll come up just for a minute,” Madeleine said.

  “Special Days”

  fête / festivity

  The amorous subject experiences every meeting

  with the loved being as a festival.

  1. The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the promised presence is an u
nheard-of totality of pleasures, a banquet; I rejoice like the child laughing at the sight of the mother whose mere presence heralds and signifies a plenitude of satisfactions: I am about to have before me, and for myself, the “source of all good things.”

  “I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.”

  It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first moment she’d seen him. She hadn’t even known him then, and so what she’d felt was only sexual attraction, not love. Even after they’d gone out for coffee, she couldn’t say that what she was feeling was anything more than infatuation. But ever since the night when they went back to Leonard’s place after watching Amarcord and started fooling around, when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, the way she often was with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she’d spent the entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off, worrying that her body wasn’t good enough, or that her breath was bad from the Caesar salad she’d unwisely ordered at dinner; worrying, too, about having suggested they order martinis because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, “Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we’re Salinger characters”; after having had, as a consequence of all this anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they’d put together; and after Leonard (like every guy) had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping she didn’t get a urinary tract infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she’d just spent the whole night worrying wasn’t, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love. And certainly after they’d spent the next three days at Leonard’s place having sex and eating pizza, after she’d relaxed enough to be able to come at least once in a while and finally to stop worrying so much about having an orgasm because her hunger for Leonard was in some way satisfied by his satisfaction, after she’d allowed herself to sit naked on his gross couch and to walk to the bathroom knowing he was staring at her (imperfect) ass, to root for food in his disgusting refrigerator, to read the brilliant half-page of philosophy paper sticking up out of his typewriter, and to hear him pee with taurine force into the toilet bowl, certainly, by the end of those three days, Madeleine knew she was in love.