The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Larry and he whirled on past the cheering crowd and down the slope of College Street. Mitchell kept an eye out for the Hannas, but didn’t see them. He didn’t see Madeleine, either.

  At the bottom of the slope, the procession lost momentum, and the graduating class of 1982, drifting to the curbside, became onlookers themselves.

  Mitchell took off his cap and wiped his forehead. He didn’t feel like celebrating, particularly. College had been easy. The idea that graduating was any kind of accomplishment seemed laughable to him. But he had enjoyed himself, thoroughly, and right now he was reverentially buzzed, and so he stood and applauded his classmates, trying to join in the jubilation of the day as best he could.

  He wasn’t thinking religious thoughts, or reciting the Jesus Prayer, when he noticed Professor Richter marching down the hill toward him. It was the faculty brigade now, professors and assistant professors in full academic regalia, their doctoral hoods hemmed in velvet signifying their disciplines and lined with satin representing their alma maters, the crimson of Harvard, the green of Dartmouth, the light blue of Tufts.

  It surprised Mitchell that Professor Richter would take part in such silly pageantry. He could have been at home reading Heidegger, but instead he was here, wasting his time to parade down a hill in honor of yet another commencement ceremony, and to parade with what appeared to be absolute exhilaration.

  At the genuine endpoint of his college career, Mitchell was left with that startling sight: Herr Doktor Professor Richter prancing by, his face lit with a childlike joy it had never displayed in the seminar room for Religion and Alienation. As if Richter had found the cure for alienation. As if he’d beaten the odds of the age.

  •

  “Congratulations!” the taxi driver said.

  Madeleine glanced up, momentarily confused, before she remembered what she was wearing.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Since most streets around campus were blocked off, the driver was taking the long way around, going down Hope Street to Wickenden.

  “You a med student?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The driver lifted his hands from the wheel. “We’re going to the hospital, right? So I thought maybe you’re planning on being a doctor.”

  “No, not me,” Madeleine answered nearly inaudibly, looking out the window. The driver took the message and was silent the rest of the way.

  As the cab crossed the river, Madeleine took off her cap and gown. The interior of the car smelled of air freshener, something noninterventionist, like vanilla. Madeleine had always liked air fresheners. She’d never thought anything about it until Leonard had told her that it indicated a willingness, on her part, to avoid unpleasant realities. “It isn’t like the room doesn’t smell bad,” he’d said. “It’s just that you can’t smell it.” She’d thought she’d caught him in a logical inconsistency, and had cried out, “How can a room smell bad if it smells nice?” And Leonard had replied, “Oh, it still smells bad all right. You’re mistaking properties with substance.”

  These were the kinds of conversations she had with Leonard. They were part of why she liked him so much. You could be going anywhere, doing anything, and an air freshener would lead to a little symposium.

  She wondered now, though, if his many-branching thoughts had in fact led straight to where he was now.

  The taxi pulled up to a hospital that called to mind a badly aging Holiday Inn. Eight stories tall, glass-fronted, the white building looked soiled, as though it had absorbed the filth from the adjoining streets. The concrete urns flanking the entrance contained no flowers, only cigarette butts. A spidery figure suggestive of blue-collar hard luck and work-related illness was propelling himself with a walker through the perfectly functioning automatic doors.

  In the atrium-like lobby, Madeleine made two wrong turns before finding the front desk. The receptionist took one look at her before asking, “You here for Bankhead?”

  Madeleine was taken aback. Then she glanced around the waiting room and saw that she was the only white person there.

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t let you go up yet. Too many people up there already. Soon as someone comes down, I’ll let you up.”

  This was another surprise. Leonard’s emotional collapse, indeed his entire self-presentation as a nonperforming adult, wasn’t consistent with a surplus of sickroom visitors. Madeleine was jealous of the unknown company.

  She signed in and took a seat facing the elevators. The carpet bore a mood-elevating design of blue squares, each framing a child’s crayon drawing: a rainbow, a unicorn, a happy family. People had brought in take-out food to eat while they waited, foam containers of jerk chicken and barbecued brisket. In the chair opposite her, a toddler was napping.

  Madeleine gazed at the carpet without benefit.

  After twenty long minutes, the elevator doors opened and two young white guys got off. Reassuringly, both were male. One guy was tall with B-52 hair, the other short, wearing a T-shirt with the famous photograph of Einstein sticking out his tongue.

  “He seemed good to me,” the first guy said. “He seemed better.”

  “That was better? Jesus, I need a cigarette.”

  They passed by without noticing Madeleine.

  As soon as they were gone, she went up to the receptionist.

  “Fourth floor,” the woman said, handing her a pass.

  The large-capacity elevator, built to accommodate stretchers and medical equipment, rose slowly, with Madeleine its single occupant. Up past Obstetrics and Rheumatology, past Osteology and Oncology, beyond all the ills that could happen to the human body, none of which had happened to Leonard, the elevator carried her to the Psychiatric Unit, where what happened to people happened in the head. She’d been prepared, by the movies, for a site of harsh incarceration. But except for a red button that opened the double doors from the outside (a button that had no corresponding release inside), there was little sign of confinement. The corridor was pale green, the linoleum highly polished, squeaky underfoot. A food cart stood against a wall. The few patients visible in their rooms—mental patients, Madeleine couldn’t help thinking—were passing time as all convalescents would, reading, dozing, staring out the window.

  At the nursing station she asked for Leonard Bankhead and was directed to the dayroom at the end of the hall.

  As soon as Madeleine stepped in, the light made her wince. The brightness of the dayroom seemed itself a therapy against depression. No shadows were allowed. Madeleine squinted, looking around at the Formica tables where robed and slippered patients sat alone or in the company of shoe-wearing visitors. A TV was bolted to an elevated rack in one corner, the volume loud. Evenly spaced windows gave views of city roofs jutting and dropping toward the bay.

  Leonard was sitting in a chair fifteen feet away. A guy with glasses was leaning forward, speaking to him.

  “So, Leonard,” the guy with the glasses was saying. “You manufactured a little mental illness to get in here and get some help. And now you’re in and you’ve got some help, and you realize maybe you’re not so bad off as you thought.”

  Leonard appeared to be listening intently to what the guy was saying. He wasn’t wearing a hospital robe, as Madeleine expected, but his normal clothes—work shirt, carpenter’s pants, blue bandanna on his head. All that was missing were his Timberlands. Leonard had on open-toed hospital slippers, with socks. His stubble was longer than usual.

  “You had some issues that weren’t being addressed by your therapy,” the guy with the glasses said, “and so you had to exaggerate them in order to bring them into a bigger arena and have them dealt with.” Whoever the guy was, he seemed tremendously satisfied by his interpretation. He sat back, looking at Leonard as if expecting applause.

  Madeleine took this opportunity to come forward.

  Seeing her, Leonard rose from his chair.

  “Madeleine. Hey,” he said softly. “Thanks for coming.”

  And so it was established:
the gravity of Leonard’s predicament outweighed the fact that they’d broken up. Nullified it. Which meant that she could hug him, if she wanted.

  She didn’t, however. She was worried that physical contact might be against the rules.

  “Do you know Henry?” Leonard said, keeping up the formalities. “Madeleine, Henry. Henry, Madeleine.”

  “Welcome to visiting hours,” Henry said. He had a deep voice, the voice of authority. He was wearing a Madras jacket that pinched under the arms and a white shirt.

  The terrible brightness of the room had the effect of making the floor-to-ceiling windows reflective, even though it was daylight outside. Madeleine saw the ghost image of herself looking at an equally ghostly Leonard. One young woman who had no visitors—and who was in a bathrobe, with wild, uncombed hair—was circling the room, muttering to herself.

  “Nice place, huh?” Leonard said.

  “It seems O.K.”

  “It’s a state hospital. This is where people go if they don’t have the money to go to somewhere like Silverlake.”

  “Leonard is a little disappointed,” Henry explained, “not to be in the company of first-class depressives.”

  Madeleine didn’t know who Henry was or why he was here. His jocularity seemed, at the least, insensitive, if not downright malicious. But Leonard didn’t seem bothered. He took in everything Henry said with a disciple-like neediness. This, and the way he occasionally sucked on his upper lip, were the only things that seemed off about him.

  “The flip side of self-loathing is grandiosity,” Leonard observed.

  “Right,” Henry said. “So if you’re going to crack up, you want to crack up like Robert Lowell.”

  The choice of the phrase crack up struck Madeleine as less than ideal as well. She resented Henry for it. At the same time, the fact that Henry was belittling Leonard’s illness suggested that maybe it wasn’t so serious.

  Maybe Henry was handling this the right way. She was eager for any pointers. But levity was beyond her. She felt painfully awkward and tongue-tied.

  Madeleine had never been close to anyone with a verifiable mental illness. She instinctively avoided unstable people. As uncharitable as this attitude was, it was part and parcel of being a Hanna, of being a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person. If there was one thing Madeleine Hanna was not, it was mentally unstable. That had been the script, anyway. But sometime after finding Billy Bainbridge in bed with two women, Madeleine had become aware of the capacity in herself for a helpless sadness not unlike clinical depression; and certainly in these last weeks, sobbing in her room over her breakup with Leonard, getting wasted and having sex with Thurston Meems, pinning her last hope on being accepted to a graduate school she wasn’t even sure she wanted to attend, broken by love, by empty promiscuity, by self-doubt, Madeleine recognized that she and a mentally ill person were not necessarily mutually exclusive categories.

  A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?

  “Leonard’s concerned they’re going to keep him in here indefinitely, which I don’t think is the case.” Henry was talking again. “You’re fine, Leonard. Just tell the doctor what you told me. They’re just keeping you in here for observation.”

  “The doctor’s supposed to call in a minute,” Leonard informed Madeleine.

  “You manufactured a little mental illness to get in here and get some help,” Henry repeated once more. “And now you feel better and you’re ready to go home.”

  Leonard leaned forward, all ears. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I had to take three incompletes. I just want to finish up those classes and graduate.”

  Madeleine had never seen Leonard on such good behavior. The willing schoolboy, the star patient.

  “That’s a good thing,” Henry said. “That’s a healthy thing. You want your life back.”

  Leonard looked from Henry to Madeleine and robotically repeated, “I want my life back. I want to get out of here and finish my incompletes and graduate.”

  A nurse stuck her head into the dayroom.

  “Leonard? Dr. Shieu’s on the phone for you.”

  As eagerly as someone interviewing for a job, Leonard stood up. “Here goes,” he said.

  “Tell the doctor what you told me,” said Henry.

  When Leonard had left, they both remained silent. Finally Henry spoke.

  “I’m guessing you’re Leonard’s girlfriend,” he said.

  “Unclear at this point,” Madeleine replied.

  “He’s in a fugue state.” Henry rotated his index finger in the air. “Just a tape loop, going around and around.”

  “But you just told him he was fine.”

  “Well, that’s what Leonard needs to hear.”

  “You’re not a doctor, though,” she said.

  “No,” Henry said. “But I am a psych major. Which means I’ve read a lot of Freud.” He broke into a big, awkward, flirtatious Cheshire cat grin.

  “And here we are,” Madeleine tartly replied, “living in post-Freudian times.”

  Henry bore this dig with something like pleasure. “If you are Leonard’s girlfriend,” he said, “or if you’re thinking of becoming Leonard’s girlfriend, or if you’re thinking of getting back together with him, my advice would be not to do that.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

  “I could have sworn we just met,” Madeleine said. “And that you don’t know anything about me.”

  Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, “People don’t save other people. People save themselves.”

  He left her with that to think about.

  The woman with the uncombed hair was staring up at the TV, tying and untying the belt of her robe. A young black woman, college-age herself, was sitting at a table with what looked to be her parents. They seemed used to the surroundings.

  After a few more minutes, Leonard returned. The woman with the uncombed hair called out, “Hey, Leonard. Did you see any lunch out there?”

  “I didn’t,” Leonard said. “Not yet.”

  “I could use some lunch.”

  “Another half hour, it’ll be here,” Leonard said helpfully.

  He had the air more of a doctor than of a patient. The woman seemed to trust him. She nodded and turned away.

  Leonard sat in the chair and leaned forward, jiggling his knee.

  Madeleine was trying to think of something to say, but everything she thought of sounded like an attack. How long have you been in here? Why didn’t you tell me? Is it true you were diagnosed three years ago? Why didn’t you tell me you were on medication? My roommates knew and I didn’t!

  She settled on “What did the doctor say?”

  “She doesn’t want to discharge me yet,” Leonard said equably, bearing up to the news. “She doesn’t want to talk about discharging me yet.”

  “Just go along with her. Just stay here and rest. I bet you could finish your incompletes in here.”

  Leonard looked from side to side, speaking softly so that no one would overhear. “That’s about all I can do. Like I said, this is a state hospital.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it’s mostly just throwing medicine at people.”

  “Are you taking anything?”

  He hesitated before answering. “Lithium, mostly. Which I’ve been on awhile. They’re recalibrating my dose.”

  “Is it helping?”

  “Some side effects, but yeah. Essentially the answer is yes.”

  It was hard to tell if this was indeed so, or if Leonard wanted it to be. He seemed to be concentrating intensely on Madeleine’s face, as though it would provide him crucial information.

  Abruptly he turned and regarded his reflection in the window, rubbing his cheeks.

  “They only let us
shave once a week,” he said. “An orderly has to be there while we do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Razor blades. That’s why I look like this.”

  Madeleine glanced around the room to see if anyone was touching. No one was.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.

  “We broke up.”

  “Leonard! If I knew you were depressed, that wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “The breakup was why I was depressed,” Leonard said.

  This was news. This was, in an inappropriate but real way, good news.

  “I sabotaged you and me,” Leonard said. “I see that now. I’m able to think a little more clearly now. Part of growing up in the kind of family I come from, a family of alcoholics, is that you begin to normalize disease and dysfunctionality. Disease and dysfunctionality are normal for me. What’s not normal is feeling …” He broke off. He inclined his head, his dark eyes focusing on the linoleum, as he continued: “Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you’re basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn’t go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it. I go and reject it by throwing Roland Barthes in your face.”