The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Now he let himself into his apartment and went straight to Larry’s door, flinging it open.

  On a futon mattress, his face half-hidden in a bush of Garfunkel hair, Larry lay on his side, his thin frame forming a Z. He looked like a figure at Pompeii, someone who’d curled up in a corner as the lava and ash came through the window. Thumbtacked to the wall above his head were two photographs of Antonin Artaud. In the photo on the left, Artaud was young and unbelievably handsome. In the other, taken a brief decade later, the playwright looked like a withered maniac. It was the speed and totality of Artaud’s physical and mental disintegration that appealed to Larry.

  “Get up,” Mitchell said to him.

  When Larry didn’t respond, Mitchell picked up a Samuel French script from the floor and tossed it at his head.

  Larry groaned and rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open, but he seemed in no rush to regain consciousness. “What time is it?”

  “It’s late. We’ve got to get going.”

  After a long moment, Larry sat up. He was on the small side, with a puckish or faun-like quality to his face, which, depending on the light or how much he’d been partying, could look either as high-cheekboned as Rudolf Nureyev or as hollow-cheeked as the figure in Munch’s The Scream. Right now, it was somewhere in between.

  “You missed a good party last night,” he said.

  Mitchell was stone-faced. “I’m over parties.”

  “Now, now, Mitchell, don’t be extreme. Is this how you’re going to be on our trip? A drag?”

  “I just saw Madeleine,” Mitchell said with urgency. “She decided to start talking to me again. But then I said something she didn’t like, and now she isn’t.”

  “Nice job.”

  “She broke up with Bankhead, though.”

  “I know she did,” Larry said.

  An alarm went off in Mitchell’s head. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Because she left the party last night with Thurston Meems. She was on the prowl, Mitchell. I told you to come. Too bad you’re over parties.”

  Mitchell stood up straighter to blunt the force of this revelation. Larry knew, of course, of Mitchell’s obsession with Madeleine. Larry had heard Mitchell extol her virtues and defend or contextualize her more questionable attributes. Mitchell had revealed to Larry, as you did only to a real friend, the extent of his crazy thinking when it came to Madeleine. Still, Mitchell had his pride, and showed no reaction. “Get your ass up,” he said, withdrawing into the hall. “I don’t want to be late.”

  Back in his room, Mitchell closed the door and went to sit in his desk chair, hanging his head. Certain details of the morning, previously illegible, were slowly revealing significance, like skywriting. Madeleine’s disheveled hair. Her hangover.

  Suddenly, with savage decisiveness, he spun around and ripped off the lid of the cardboard box that was lying on his desk. Inside was his graduation robe. Taking it out, he stood up and pulled the shiny acrylic fabric over his head and shoulders. The tassel, class pin, and mortarboard were shrink-wrapped in separate sheets of plastic. After ripping these off, and screwing the tassel into the mortarboard so thoroughly it made a dent, Mitchell unfolded the cap’s bat wings and set it on his head.

  He heard Larry pad into the kitchen. “Mitchell,” Larry called, “should I bring a joint?”

  Without answering, Mitchell went to stand before the mirror on the back of his bedroom door. Mortarboards were medieval in origin. They were as old as “The Cloud of Unknowing.” That was why they looked so ridiculous. That was why he looked so ridiculous wearing one.

  He remembered a line from Meister Eckhart: “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

  Mitchell wondered if he was supposed to erase himself, or his past, or other people, or what. He was ready to begin erasing immediately, as soon as he knew what to rub out.

  When he came out into the kitchen, Larry was making coffee, wearing his cap and gown, too. They looked at each other with mild amusement.

  “Definitely bring a joint,” Mitchell said.

  •

  Madeleine took the long way back to her building.

  She was furious at everyone and everything, at her mother for making her invite Mitchell over in the first place, at Leonard for not calling, at the weather for being cold, and at college for ending.

  It was impossible to be friends with guys. Every guy she’d ever been friends with had ended up wanting something else, or had wanted something else from the beginning, and had been friends only under false pretenses.

  Mitchell wanted revenge. That was all this was. He wanted to hurt her and he knew her weak spots. It was absurd of him to say that he wasn’t mentally attracted to her. Hadn’t he been after her all these years? Hadn’t he told her that he “loved her mind”? Madeleine knew she wasn’t as smart as Mitchell. But was Mitchell as smart as Leonard? What about that? That was what she should have told Mitchell. Instead of crying and running away, she should have pointed out that Leonard was perfectly happy with her level of intelligence.

  This thought, shiny with triumph, dimmed on the immediate reflection that Leonard and she were no longer going out.

  Gazing at Canal Street through the distortion of tears—they refracted a stop sign at a Cubist angle—Madeleine allowed herself once again to wish the forbidden wish of getting back together with Leonard. It seemed to her that if she could just have that one thing, all her other problems would be bearable.

  The clock on the Citizens Bank read 8:47. She had an hour to get dressed and up the hill.

  Up ahead, the river appeared, green and unmoving. A few years ago, it had caught on fire. For weeks the fire department had tried to put out the conflagration without success. Which invited the question of how, exactly, did you douse a burning river? What could you do, when the retardant was also the accelerant?

  The lovelorn English major contemplated the symbolism of this.

  In a thin little park she’d never noticed before, Madeleine sat on a bench. Natural opiates were flooding her system and, after a few minutes, she started to feel a bit better. She dried her eyes. From now on, she wouldn’t have to see Mitchell ever again, if she didn’t want. Or Leonard, either. Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her—a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special—and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.

  She left the park, climbing a small cobblestone lane back to Benefit Street.

  At the Narragansett, she let herself into the lobby and took the elevator up to her floor. She felt tired, dehydrated, and still in need of a shower.

  As she was putting her key in the door, Abby opened it from inside. Her hair was stuffed into the graduation cap. “Hi! We thought we were going to have to leave without you.”

  “Sorry,” Madeleine said, “my parents take forever. Can you wait for me? I’ll be really fast.”

  In the living room, Olivia was painting her toenails, her feet up on the coffee table. The telephone began to ring, and Abby went to get it.

  “Pookie said you left with Thurston Meems,” Olivia said, applying polish. “But I told her that couldn’t possibly be true.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Madeleine said.

  “Fine. I don’t even care,” Olivia said. “But Pookie and I just want to know one thing.”

  “I’m going to take a quick shower.”

  “It’s for you,” Abby said, holding out the phone.

  Madeleine had no desire to talk to anybody. But it was better than fending off more questions.

  She took the receiver and said hello.

  “Madeleine?” It was a guy’s voice, unfamiliar.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ken. Auerbach.” When Madeleine didn’t respond, the caller said, “I’m a friend of
Leonard’s.”

  “Oh,” Madeleine said. “Hi.”

  “I’m sorry to call on graduation. But I’m leaving today and I thought I should call you before I go.” There was a pause during which Madeleine tried to catch up to the reality of the moment, and before she did, Auerbach said, “Leonard’s in the hospital.”

  No sooner had he delivered this news than he added, “Don’t worry. He’s not hurt. But he’s in the hospital and I thought you should know. If you didn’t already. Maybe you knew.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Madeleine replied in what sounded to her like a calm tone. Keeping it that way, she added, “Can you hold on a minute?” Pressing the receiver against her chest, she picked up the base of the phone, which was on an extralong cord, and carried it out of the living room and back to her bedroom, where it just barely reached. She closed the door and lifted the handset to her ear. She was worried her voice might break when she spoke again.

  “What’s the matter? Is he O.K.?”

  “He’s fine,” Auerbach assured her. “Physically he’s fine. I was worried I might freak you out if I called but—yeah, no—he’s not injured or anything like that.”

  “Then what is he?”

  “Well, at first he was a little manic. But now he’s really depressed. Like, clinically.”

  For the next several minutes, while rain clouds passed over the capitol dome framed by her window, Auerbach told Madeleine what had happened.

  It had started with Leonard not being able to sleep. He came to class complaining of exhaustion. At first, no one paid much attention. Being exhausted was in large measure what being Leonard was all about. Previously, Leonard’s exhaustion had had to do with the inherent demands of the day, with getting up, getting dressed, making it to campus. It wasn’t that he hadn’t slept; it was that being awake was too much to bear. By contrast, Leonard’s present exhaustion had to do with the night. He felt too wired to go to bed, he said, and so began staying up until three or four in the morning. When he forced himself to turn off the lights and get into bed, his heart raced, and he broke into a sweat. He tried to read, but his thoughts kept racing, and soon he was pacing his apartment.

  After a week of this, Leonard had gone to Health Services, where a doctor, accustomed to seeing stressed-out undergrads near semester’s end, prescribed sleeping pills and told Leonard to stop drinking coffee. When the pills didn’t work the doctor prescribed a mild tranquilizer, and then a stronger one, but even this brought Leonard no more than two or three hours of shallow, dreamless, nonreplenishing sleep per night.

  It was right around then, Auerbach said, that Leonard stopped taking his lithium. It wasn’t clear if Leonard had done this on purpose or just forgot. But pretty soon he was calling people on the telephone. He called everybody. He talked for fifteen minutes, or a half hour, or an hour, or two hours. At first, he was entertaining, as always. People were happy to hear from him. He called his friends two or three times a day. Then five or six. Then ten. Then twelve. He called from his apartment. He called from pay phones around campus, the locations of which he had memorized. Leonard knew about a phone in the subbasement of the physics lab, and of a cozy telephone closet in the administration building. He knew about a broken pay phone on Thayer Street that recycled your coin. He knew about unguarded phones in the philosophy department. From each and every one of these phones Leonard called to tell his listeners how exhausted he was, how insomniac, how insomniac, how exhausted. All he could do, apparently, was talk on the phone. As soon as the sun rose, Leonard telephoned his early-rising friends. Having been up all night, he called to speak to people not yet in the mood for conversation. From them, he moved on to other people, people he knew well or had barely met, students, departmental secretaries, his dermatologist, his advisor. When it got too late on the East Coast to call anyone, Leonard went through his phone book, looking up the numbers of friends on the West Coast. And when it got too late to call Portland or San Francisco, Leonard faced the terrifying three or four hours when he was alone in his apartment with his own disintegrating mind.

  That was the phrase Auerbach used, telling the story to Madeleine. “Disintegrating mind.” Madeleine listened, trying to fit the picture Auerbach was sketching with the Leonard she knew, whose mind was anything but weak.

  “What do you mean?” Madeleine said. “Are you saying Leonard’s going crazy?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Auerbach said.

  “What do you mean his mind is disintegrating?”

  “That’s what he told me it felt like. To him,” Auerbach said.

  As his mind began to come apart, Leonard sought to keep it together by talking into a plastic handset, to reach and interact with another person, to outfit that person with a precise description of his despair, his physical symptoms, his hypochondriacal surmises. He called to ask people about their moles. Did they ever have a mole that looked suspicious? That bled or changed shape? Or a red thingy on the shaft of their penises? Could that be herpes? What did herpes look like? What was the difference between a herpes lesion and a chancre? Leonard strained the decorum of masculine friendship, Auerbach said, by calling his male friends and inquiring about the state of their erections. Had they ever failed to get it up? If so, under what conditions? Leonard began referring to his erections as “Gumbies.” These were erections that bent, that were as pliable as the old childhood figurine. “I get a total Gumby sometimes,” he said. He worried that biking through Oregon one summer had compromised his prostate. He went to the library and found a study of erectile dysfunction in Tour de France athletes. Because Leonard was brilliant and historically hilarious, he’d built up a huge reserve of good feeling in people, memories of great times with him, and, now, in his million phone calls, he began to draw on this reserve, one call at a time, as people waited through his kvetching and tried to coax him out of his depression, and it was a long time before he exhausted his reserve of being liked and admired.

  Leonard’s dark moods had always been part of his appeal. It was a relief to hear him enumerate his frailties, his misgivings about the American formula for success. So many people at college were jacked up on ambition, possessors of steroidal egos, clever but cutthroat, diligent but insensitive, shiny but dull, that everyone felt compelled to be upbeat, down with the program, all systems firing, when everyone knew, in his or her heart, that this wasn’t how they really felt. People doubted themselves and feared the future. They were intimidated, scared, and so talking to Leonard, who was all these things times ten, made people feel less bad about themselves, and less alone. Leonard’s calls were like telephone therapy. Plus, he was way worse off than everybody else! He was Dr. Freud and Dr. Doom, father confessor and humble penitent, shrink and shrunk. He put on no show. He wasn’t a fake. He spoke honestly and listened with compassion. At their best, Leonard’s phone conversations were a kind of art and a form of ministry.

  And yet, Auerbach said, there was a change to Leonard’s pessimism about this time. It deepened; it purified. It lost its previous comedic habiliments, its air of shtick, and became unadulterated, lethal, pure despair. Whatever Leonard, who’d always been “depressed,” had had before, it wasn’t depression. This was depression. This monotone monologue delivered by an unbathed guy lying on his back in the middle of the floor. This unmodulated recitation of his young life’s failures, failures that in Leonard’s mind already foredoomed him to a life of ever-diminishing returns. “Where’s Leonard?” he kept asking, on the phone. Where was the guy who could write a twenty-page paper on Spinoza with his left hand while playing chess with his right? Where was the professorial Leonard, purveyor of obscure information on the history of type in Flanders versus Wallonia, deliverer of disquisitions on the literary merits of sixteen Ghanaian, Kenyan, and Ivory Coast novelists, all of whom had been published in a sixties-era paperback series called “Out of Africa” that Leonard had once found at the Strand and purchased for fifty cents apiece and read every volume of? “Where’s Leonard?” Leonar
d asked. Leonard didn’t know.

  Slowly it began to dawn on Leonard’s friends that it didn’t matter whom Leonard called on the phone. He forgot who was on the other end and, whenever one person managed to hang up, Leonard called somebody else and picked up right where he’d left off. And people were busy. They had other things to do. So gradually his friends began to make up excuses when Leonard called. They said they had a class or a meeting with a professor. They minimized talking time and, after a while, stopped answering the phone altogether. Auerbach himself had done this. He felt guilty about it now, which was why he had called Madeleine. “We knew Leonard was in bad shape,” he said, “but we didn’t know he was in that bad a shape.”