The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  All this led up to the day Auerbach’s phone rang around five in the afternoon. Suspecting that it was Leonard, he didn’t pick up. But the phone kept ringing and ringing and finally Auerbach couldn’t stand it anymore and answered.

  “Ken?” Leonard said in a quavering tone. “They’re giving me an incomplete, Ken. I’m not going to graduate.”

  “Who says?”

  “Prof. Nalbandian just called. He says there’s no time for me to make up the work I’ve missed. So he’s giving me an incomplete.”

  This didn’t come as a surprise to Auerbach. But the vulnerability of Leonard’s voice, the child-lost-in-the-woods cry of it, made Auerbach want to say something soothing. “That’s not so bad. He’s not flunking you.”

  “That’s not the point, Ken,” Leonard said, aggrieved. “The point is that he’s one of my professors, who I’m hoping will write recommendations for me. I’ve fucked everything up, Ken. I’m not going to graduate on time, with everyone else. If I don’t graduate, then they’re going to cancel my internship at Pilgrim Lake. I don’t have any money, Ken. My parents aren’t going to help me. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. I’m only twenty-two and I’ve fucked up my life!”

  Auerbach tried to reason with Leonard, to talk him down, but no matter what arguments he offered, Leonard remained fixed on the direness of his situation. He kept complaining about having no money, how his parents didn’t help him like most kids at Brown, the disadvantage he’d been at his whole life and how this, too, had led to his precarious emotional state. They went around and around for over an hour, Leonard breathing heavily into the mouthpiece, his voice sounding increasingly desperate, while Auerbach ran out of things to say and began offering tactics that sounded silly even to him, for instance that Leonard needed to stop thinking so much about himself, that he should go outside and look at the magnolias blooming on the green—had he seen the magnolias?—that he might try comparing his situation with that of people truly desperate, South American gold miners, or quadriplegics, or patients with advanced MS, that life wasn’t as bad as Leonard was making it out to be. And then Leonard did something he’d never done before. He hung up on Auerbach. It was the only time during his telephonic mania that Leonard had been the first to hang up, and it scared Auerbach. He called again and got no answer. Finally, after calling a couple of other people who knew Leonard, Auerbach decided to go to Planet Street, where he found Leonard in a frantic state. After much coaxing, he finally persuaded Leonard to let him take him to Health Services, and the doctor there admitted Leonard for the night. The next day, they sent him to Providence Hospital, where he was now in the psychiatric ward, receiving treatment.

  Given more time, Madeleine could have separated and identified the welter of emotions that were now surging through her. There was a foreground of panic. Behind this were embarrassment and anger for being the last to know. But underneath everything, bubbling up, was a strange buoyancy.

  “I’ve known Leonard since he was first diagnosed,” Auerbach said. “Freshman year. He’s fine if he takes his medicine. He’s always been fine. He just needs some support right now. That’s basically why I called.”

  “Thanks,” Madeleine said. “I’m glad you did.”

  “So far, a few of us have been holding down the ship, visiting-hours-wise. But everybody’s booking today. And—I don’t know—I’m sure Leonard would like to see you.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t say that. But I saw him last night and I’m sure he would.”

  With that, Auerbach gave her the address of the hospital and the number of the nurses’ station, and said goodbye.

  Madeleine was now filled with purpose. Putting the receiver down firmly, she strode out her bedroom door and back into the living room.

  Olivia still had her legs on the coffee table, letting her toenails dry. Abby was pouring a pink smoothie from a blender into a glass.

  “You traitors!” Madeleine shouted.

  “What?” Abby said, surprised.

  “You knew!” Madeleine cried. “You knew Leonard was in the hospital the whole time! That’s why you said he wouldn’t be at the party.”

  Abby and Olivia exchanged a look. Each was waiting for the other to speak.

  “You knew and you didn’t tell me!”

  “We did it for your own good,” Abby said, looking full of concern. “We didn’t want you to get upset and start obsessing. I mean, you were already barely going to your classes. You were just getting over Leonard and we thought that—”

  “How would you like it if Whitney was in the hospital and I didn’t tell you?”

  “That’s different,” Abby said. “You and Leonard broke up. You weren’t even speaking.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Madeleine said.

  “I’m still going out with Whitney.”

  “How could you know and not tell me?”

  “O.K.,” Abby said. “Sorry. We’re really sorry.”

  “You lied to me.”

  Olivia shook her head, unwilling to accept this. “Leonard’s crazy,” she said. “Do you realize that? I’m sorry, Maddy, but Leonard—is—crazy. He wouldn’t leave his apartment! They had to call security to break down his door.”

  These details were new. Madeleine absorbed them for later analysis. “Leonard is not crazy,” she said. “He’s just depressed. It’s an illness.”

  She didn’t know if it was an illness. She didn’t know anything about it. But the speed with which she plucked this assurance from the air had the added benefit of making her believe what she was saying.

  Abby was still looking sympathetic, going cow-eyed, tilting her head to the side. Her upper lip had smoothie on it. “We were just worried about you, Mad,” she said. “We were worried you might use this to get back with Leonard.”

  “Oh, so you were protecting me.”

  “You don’t have to be snide,” Olivia said.

  “I can’t believe I wasted my senior year living with you two.”

  “Oh, like it’s been a real joy living with you!” Olivia said with ferocious cheer. “You and your Lover’s Discourse. Give me a break! You know that line you’re always quoting? About how nobody would fall in love unless they read about it first? Well, all you do is read about it.”

  “I think you have to agree it was pretty nice of us to ask you to live with us,” Abby said, licking smoothie off her lip. “I mean, we found this place and put down the security deposit and everything.”

  “I wish you’d never asked me,” Madeleine said. “Then maybe I’d be living with somebody I could trust.”

  “Let’s go,” Abby said, turning away from Madeleine with an air of finality. “We’ve got to get up to the march.”

  “My nails aren’t dry,” Olivia said.

  “Let’s go. We’re late.”

  Madeleine didn’t wait to hear more. Turning, she went to her room and closed the door. When she was sure Abby and Olivia were gone, she gathered up her own graduation gear—the cap and gown, the tassel—and made her way down to the lobby. It was 9:32. She had twelve minutes to get to campus.

  The quickest way up the hill—and the direction in which she didn’t run the risk of overtaking her roommates—was up Bowen Street. Bowen Street had its own perils, however. Mitchell lived there and she was in no mood to run into him again. She proceeded cautiously around the corner and, not seeing him, hurried by his house and began climbing the slope.

  The path was slippery from the rain. By the time she reached the top, Madeleine’s loafers were caked with mud. Her head began to pound again and, as she hurried along, a gust of her own bodily scent rose out of the collar of her dress. For the first time, she examined the stain. It could have been anything. Nevertheless, she stopped, pulled the graduation robe over her head, and continued climbing.

  She pictured Leonard barricaded in his apartment, with security officers breaking down his door, and a fearful tenderness took hold of her.

  And yet th
ere was this countervailing buoyancy, a balloon rising in her despite the immediate emergency …

  Reaching Congdon Street, she picked up speed. In a few blocks she saw the crowds. Policemen had stopped traffic, and people in raincoats were filling Prospect and College Streets, in front of the art building and the library. The wind was whipping up again, the tops of the elms shaking above the dark sky.

  Passing by Carrie Tower, Madeleine heard a brass band tuning up. Grad students and medical students were lining up along Waterman Street, while ceremonially dressed officials checked the formation. She wanted to go through Faunce House Arch onto the green, but the line was blocking her. Instead of waiting, she proceeded farther along Faunce House and down the steps of the post office, intending to reach the green through the underground passage. As she was crossing the space, a thought occurred to her. She checked her watch again. It was 9:41. She had four minutes.

  Madeleine’s mailbox was on the bottom row of the front-facing boxes. To dial the combination, she went down on one knee, which made her feel hopeful and vulnerable at once. The brass door opened on the age-darkened slot. Inside was a single envelope. Calmly (for the successful candidate exhibited neither anxiety nor haste), Madeleine pulled it out.

  It was the letter from Yale, torn, and enclosed in a plastic USPS envelope bearing a printed notice: “This article of mail was damaged en route to the recipient. We apologize for the delay.”

  She opened the heat-sealed plastic and gingerly pulled out the paper envelope, trying not to tear it further. It had been caught in a sorting machine. The postmark read “April 1, 1982.”

  The Faunce House post office knew all about acceptance letters. Yearly, they poured in, from medical schools, from law schools, from graduate programs. Students had knelt before these boxes just as she was now doing to pull out letters that transformed them instantly into Rhodes Scholars, senatorial aides, fledgling reporters, Wharton matriculants. As Madeleine opened the envelope, it occurred to her that it wasn’t very heavy.

  Dear Ms. Hanna,

  This letter is to inform you that the Yale Graduate Program in English will not be able to offer you admission in the coming academic year, 1982–1983. We receive many qualified applicants each year and regret that we cannot always

  She made no sound. She betrayed no sign of disappointment. Gently, she closed her P.O. box, spinning the dials, and, rising to full height, walked with good posture across the post office. Near the door, finishing the work the USPS processing center had started, she tore the letter in two, pitching the pieces into the recycling bin.

  Students A, B, C, and D have applied to Yale graduate school. If A is the editor of The Harvard Crimson; B a Rhodes scholar who published a monograph on Paradise Lost in the Milton Quarterly; C a nineteen-year-old prodigy from England who speaks Russian and French and is related to Prime Minister Thatcher; and D an English major whose submission contained a so-so paper on the linking words in Pearl plus a score on the logic portion of the GRE of 520, which student doesn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting accepted?

  She’d been rejected way back in April, two months ago. Her fate had been sealed before she’d even broken up with Leonard, which meant that the one thing she’d been counting on to lift her spirits these last three weeks had been an illusion. Another crucial bit of information withheld from her.

  There were shouts on the green. With resignation, Madeleine set the mortarboard on her head like a dunce cap. She left the post office, climbing up the steps to the green.

  In the open verdant space, families were waiting for the procession to begin. Three little girls had climbed into the bronze lap of the Henry Moore sculpture, smiling and giggling, while their father knelt in the grass to take photographs. Squads of alumni were staggering about, celebrating reunions, wearing straw boaters or Brown baseball caps emblazoned with their year.

  In front of Sayles Hall people began to cheer. Madeleine looked as a Paleolithic graduate, a bog person of an alumnus enfolded in a striped blazer, was pushed into view by a retinue of blond grandchildren or great-grandchildren. From the arms of his wheelchair a raft of helium balloons rose into the spring air, each red balloon painted with a brown “Class of ’09.” The old man had his hand up to accept the applause. He was grinning with long, ghoulish teeth, his face lit with satisfaction beneath the Beefeater’s hat on his head.

  Madeleine watched the happy old man pass by. At that moment, the band launched into the processional music, and the commencement march began. The university’s CEO-like president, wearing striped velvet academic robes and a floppy Florentine cap, led the march, holding a medieval lance. Following him were plutocratic trustees, and the red-haired, macrocephalic living members of the Brown family, and assorted provosts and deans. Seniors, walking two abreast, streamed up from Wayland Arch and across the green. The parade headed past University Hall in the direction of the Van Wickel gates, where parents—including Alton and Phyllida—were expectantly massed.

  Madeleine watched the march, waiting for a place to jump in. She scanned the faces for someone she knew, her friend Kelly Traub or even Lollie and Pookie Ames. At the same time, her apprehension at running into Mitchell again, or Olivia and Abby, made her hold back, standing slightly behind a paunchy father toting a video camera.

  She couldn’t remember which side her tassel was supposed to hang on, left or right.

  The graduating class had close to twelve hundred members. They kept coming, two by two, smiling and laughing, giving fist pumps and high fives. But each person who swept by was someone Madeleine had never seen before. After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.

  Only about a hundred seniors had passed so far, but Madeleine didn’t wait for the rest. The face she wanted to see wasn’t here, anyway. Turning, she walked back through Faunce House Arch and headed up Waterman in the direction of Thayer Street. Hurrying, breaking almost into a run, holding her cap on with one hand, she reached the corner, where traffic was flowing. A minute later, she flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take her to Providence Hospital.

  •

  They had just finished the joint when the line began to move.

  For a half hour Mitchell and Larry had been standing in the blustery shade of Wriston Quad, the midpoint in a long black line of graduating seniors that stretched from the main green down the long path to the ivy-covered arch behind them, and out along Thayer Street. The narrow sidewalks tidied up the line ahead and behind, but in the open space of the quad it bulged, becoming an outdoor party. People were milling around, circulating.

  Mitchell blocked the wind with his body so that Larry could light the joint. Everyone was complaining about how cold it was and moving back and forth to stay warm.

  There were a lot of ways to defy the day’s solemnities. Some people were wearing their caps at funny angles. Others had decorated them with stickers or paint. Girls opted for feather boas, or Spring Break sunglasses, or mirrored earrings like mini disco balls. Mitchell made the observation that such shows of disobedience were commonplace at graduation ceremonies and, therefore, as time-honored as the traditions they tried to subvert, before taking the joint from Larry and defying the day’s solemnity in his own commonplace way.

  “Gaudeamus igitur,” he said, and took a drag.

  Like an egg swallowed by a black snake, the signal to march was working its way, by a nearly invisible peristalsis, along the twists and turns of the assembled marchers. But no one appeared to be moving yet. Mitchell kept squinting ahead to see. Finally the signal reached the people immediately in front of Larry and Mitchell and, all at once, the entire line surged forward.

  They passed the joint back and forth, smoking it more quickly now.

  Ahead in line Mark Klemke turned, wiggling his eyebrows, and said, “I’m naked under this robe.”

  A lot of people had brought cameras with them. Commercials had told them to record this moment on film, and so they were going ahead and recording it.
r />   It was possible to feel superior to other people and like a misfit at the same time.

  They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner’s hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one. Mitchell and Larry made their way slowly up from the leafy dimness of Wriston Quad. The ground was still coolish, unsunned. Some prankster had climbed the statue of Marcus Aurelius to place a mortarboard on the stoic’s head. His horse had an “82” painted on its steel flank. After ascending the steps alongside Leeds Theatre, they continued up past Sayles Hall and Richardson onto the green. The sky looked like something out of El Greco. Somebody’s program blew past.

  Larry offered the roach, but Mitchell shook his head. “I’m stoned,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  They were taking small, chain-gang steps, approaching the covered stage set up in front of University Hall before a sea of white folding chairs. At the top of the path, the line halted. Feeling a wave of fatigue, Mitchell was reminded why he didn’t like to get high in the morning. After the initial rush of energy, the day became a boulder you had to push uphill. He would have to stop smoking pot on his trip. He would have to clean up his act.

  The line began moving again. Through the elms, in the distance, Mitchell glimpsed the downtown skyline, and then the Van Wickel gates were looming straight ahead, and along with a thousand classmates Mitchell was carried through them.

  People were making obligatory hooting noises, throwing up their caps. The crowd outside was dense and child-starved. From the mass of middle-aged faces, those of Mitchell’s own, particular parents emerged with arresting clarity. Deanie, in a blue blazer and London Fog raincoat, was beaming at the sight of his youngest son, having forgotten, apparently, that he’d never wanted Mitchell to go to college in the East and be ruined by liberals. Lillian was waving both hands in the attention-getting way of small people. Under the estranging power of the marijuana, not to mention four years at college, Mitchell was depressed by the tacky denim sun visor his mother was wearing and by his parents’ general lack of sophistication. But something was happening to him. The gates were doing something to him already, because as he raised his hand to wave back at his parents, Mitchell felt ten years old again, tearing up, choked with feeling for these two human beings who, like figures from myth, had possessed the ability throughout his life to blend into the background, to turn to stone or wood, only to come alive again, at key moments like this, to witness his hero’s journey. Lillian had a camera. She was taking pictures. That was why Mitchell didn’t have to bother.