The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Almost immediately, the tip of his penis felt cold and he shook it one last time and fell back into bed, desolate.

  The next morning, Mitchell shouldered his pack and carried it down the stairs to the lobby, where he paid for the room and left. Breakfast was a coffee and the biscuit that came with it. His plan was to try the youth hostel again or, if need be, to spend a night on Claire’s floor. When he got to her building, however, he saw Larry sitting on the steps. His backpack was next to him. He appeared to be smoking a cigarette.

  “You don’t smoke,” Mitchell said, coming up to him.

  “I’m starting.” Larry puffed on the cigarette a few times, experimentally.

  “Why do you have your backpack?”

  Larry gave Mitchell full access to his intense blue-eyed gaze. The filterless cigarette adhered to his full lower lip.

  “Claire and I broke up,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “She thinks she might be into women. She’s not sure. Anyway, we’re going to be apart, so.”

  “She dumped you?”

  Larry winced, nearly imperceptibly. “She says she doesn’t want to be ‘exclusive.’”

  Mitchell looked away to save Larry embarrassment. “Figures,” he snorted. “You’re just a sacrificial victim.”

  “Of what?”

  “Sexist male and all that shit.”

  “I think you were the one she thought was the sexist male, Mitchell.”

  Mitchell could have objected, but he didn’t. There was no need. He had his friend back.

  Now their trip could finally begin.

  •

  On her fourteenth birthday, in November 1974, Madeleine had received a present from her older sister, Alwyn, who was away at college. The package had arrived in the mail, wrapped in psychedelic-patterned paper and sealed with red wax bearing the impressions of crescent moons and unicorns. Somehow Madeleine had known not to open the thing in front of her parents. Once she got it up to her room and was lying on her bed, she took off the wrapping paper to find a shoebox inside, its lid marked in black ink with the words “Bachelorette’s Survival Kit.” Inside, in handwriting so infinitesimal that it seemed accomplished by an awl, was the following note:

  Dear Little Sis,

  Now that you’re fourteen and have started HIGH school, I thought I should let you know a few things about S-E-X so you don’t get yourself, as the Father Figure would say, “in trouble.” Actually, I’m not worried about you getting in trouble at all. I just want my little sister to have some F-U-N!!! So here’s your new, handy-dandy “Bachelorette’s Survival Kit” containing everything a modern, sensuous woman needs for total fulfillment. Boyfriend not included.

  Happy Birthday,

  Love, Ally

  Maddy was still in her school clothes. Holding the shoebox with one hand, she took out the objects with the other. The first, a small foil package, meant nothing to her, not even when she turned it over and saw the helmeted figure on the front. Pressing her finger against the package, she could feel something slippery inside.

  Then it came to her. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-it!”

  She ran to the door and locked it. Then, thinking better, she unlocked it and ran back to the bed, where she got the foil package and the box and took them both into her bathroom, where she could lock the door without arousing suspicion. She lowered the lid of the toilet and sat down.

  Madeleine had never seen a condom package before, much less held one in her hand. She ran the ball of her thumb over it. The implication of the shape inside stirred feelings in her she wasn’t quite able to describe. The lubricious medium the condom swam in was both repellent and fascinating. The circumference of the ring frankly startled her. She hadn’t given much detailed thought to the extent of the male erection. Thus far, boys’ erections were something she and her friends giggled about and mostly didn’t mention. She thought she’d felt one once, during a slow dance at summer camp, but she couldn’t be sure: it might have been the boy’s belt buckle. In her experience, erections were occult occurrences happening elsewhere, like the bulging of a bullfrog’s throat in a distant swamp, or a puffer fish inflating in a coral reef. The only erection Madeleine had seen with her own eyes belonged to her grandmother’s Labrador, Wylie, which had rawly emerged from its fur sock as the dog maniacally humped her leg. A thing like that was enough to keep you from thinking about erections forever. The distasteful nature of that image, however, didn’t blot out the sheer revelatory nature of the condom she now held in her hand. The condom was an artifact of the adult world. Beyond her life, beyond her school, there was an agreed-upon system no one talked about, whereby pharmaceutical companies made prophylactics for men to buy and roll onto their penises, legally, in the United States of America.

  The next two items Madeleine took out of the box were part of a novelty set, the sort that issued from vending machines in men’s rooms, which was where Alwyn, or more likely Alwyn’s boyfriend, had probably gotten it along with the condom. The set included: a red rubber ring studded with wiggly stalks and labeled “French tickler”; a gag made of blue plastic consisting of two moving figures, a man with a hard-on and a woman on all fours, the lever of which, when Maddy moved it back and forth, caused the half-inch stud to prong the woman doggy-style; a small tube of “Prolong” cream, which she didn’t even want to open; and two hollow silver “Ben Wa” balls that came with no instructions and looked, frankly, like pinballs. At the bottom of the box was the strangest thing of all, a thin miniature breadstick with black fuzz stuck to it. The breadstick was taped to a three-by-five card. Madeleine brought it close to her face to read the handwritten label: “Dehydrated Prick. Just add water.” She looked at the tiny breadstick again, then at the fuzz, and then she dropped the card and shouted out, “Gross!”

  It was a while before she picked it up again, touching the edge of the three-by-five card farthest from the fuzz. Keeping her head back, she reexamined the fuzz to confirm that it was, in fact, pubic hair. Alwyn’s, most likely, though possibly her boyfriend’s. It wouldn’t have been beyond Ally to go to that length of verisimilitude. The hair was black and curly and had been clipped and glued to the base of the breadstick. The idea that it was possibly a guy’s pubic hair revolted and excited Madeleine at the same time. But it was probably Ally’s, that weirdo. What a funny, crazy sister she had! Alwyn was completely strange and unpredictable, a nonconformist, a vegetarian, a college war protester, and since Madeleine wanted to be some of these things, too, she loved and admired her sister (while continuing to think that she was totally weird). She put the dehydrated prick back into the box and picked up the little plastic couple again. She moved the lever, watching the man’s penis enter the bent-over woman.

  The memory of the Bachelorette’s Survival Kit came back to Madeleine now, in October, as she stood at the small airport in Provincetown, waiting for Phyllida and Alwyn to arrive from Boston. The night before, unexpectedly, Phyllida had telephoned with the news that Alwyn had left her husband, Blake, and that she, Phyllida, had flown up to Boston to try to intervene. She’d found Alwyn staying at the Ritz Hotel, maxing out her joint AmEx card and messengering bottles of mother’s milk to the house in Beverly where she’d left her six-month-old, Richard, in the care of his father. Having failed to persuade Alwyn to return home, Phyllida had decided to bring her to Cape Cod in the hope that Madeleine could talk some sense into her. “Ally only agreed to come for the day,” Phyllida said. “She doesn’t want us ganging up on her. We’re coming in the morning and leaving in the afternoon.”

  “What am I supposed to tell her?” Madeleine had said.

  “Tell her what you think. She listens to you.”

  “Why doesn’t Daddy talk to her?”

  “He has. It ended in a shouting match. I’m at my wit’s end, Maddy. You don’t have to do anything. Just be your sensible, reasonable self.”

  Hearing that, Madeleine almost wanted to laugh. She was desper
ately in love with a boy who’d been hospitalized, twice, for manic depression. For the last four months, instead of focusing on her “career,” she’d been nursing Leonard back to health, cooking his meals and cleaning his clothes, calming his anxieties and cheering him out of his frequent low moods. She’d been putting up with the serious side effects brought on by his new, higher dosage of lithium. No doubt largely due to all this, Madeleine had found herself, one night at the end of August, kissing Mitchell Grammaticus outside Chumley’s on Bedford Street, kissing him and enjoying it, before fleeing back to Providence and Leonard’s sickbed. The last thing she felt herself to be was sensible or reasonable. She had just started living like a grown-up and she’d never felt more vulnerable, frightened, or confused in her life.

  After she moved out of her apartment on Benefit Street, in June, Madeleine had stayed at Leonard’s place, alone, until he got out of the hospital. She felt excited to be entrusted with his things. She played his Arvo Pärt records on the stereo, lying on the couch and listening with closed eyes exactly the way Leonard did. She flipped through his books, reading his marginalia. Next to dense passages by Nietzsche or Hegel, Leonard drew faces, either smiling or frowning, or just put an “!” At night she slept in one of Leonard’s shirts. Everything in the apartment had been left exactly as it was when Leonard was taken to the hospital. There was an open notebook on the floor, in which it appeared that Leonard had been trying to figure out how long his money would hold out. The bathtub was full of newspapers. Sometimes, the emptiness of the apartment made Madeleine want to cry for all it suggested about Leonard’s aloneness in the world. Not a picture of his parents or sister anywhere. Then one morning, moving a book, she found a photograph lying underneath. It was one he’d taken of her on their first trip to the Cape, showing her lying on a motel bed, reading and eating a Klondike bar.

  After three days, unable to bear the filth a minute longer, she broke down and began cleaning. At Star Market, she bought a mop, a mop bucket, a pair of rubber gloves, and an assortment of cleansers. She knew she was setting a bad precedent even while she was doing it. She mopped the floor, dumping buckets of black water down the toilet. She went through seven rolls of paper towels, wiping crud off the bathroom floor. She threw out the mildewed shower curtain and bought a new one, bright pink for revenge. She tossed everything from the refrigerator and scrubbed the shelves. After stripping Leonard’s mattress, she balled up the sheets, intending to drop them off at the corner laundry, but instead threw them in a trash can behind the building, replacing them with her own. She hung curtains in the windows and bought a paper shade for the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  A few leaves on the ficus tree were beginning to turn brown. Feeling the soil, Madeleine found it dry. She mentioned this to Leonard during visiting hours one day.

  “You can water my tree,” he said.

  “No way. The last time you gave me so much grief.”

  “You have permission to water my tree.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a request, though.”

  “Will you please water my ficus tree for me?”

  She watered the tree. In the afternoons, when the sun came through the front window, she pulled it into the light and misted the leaves.

  Every afternoon, she went down to the hospital to see Leonard.

  The doctor had adjusted Leonard’s medication, eliminating his facial tic, and this alone made him seem much improved. He talked mainly about all the drugs he was on, their uses and contraindications. Saying their names seemed to calm him, as though he were uttering incantations: lorazepam, diazepam, chlorpromazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol. Madeleine couldn’t keep them straight. She wasn’t sure if Leonard was taking these drugs or other people in the unit were. By this time he was well versed in the clinical histories of most of his fellow patients. They treated him like an intern, discussing their cases with him, asking for information about the drugs they were taking. Leonard operated in the hospital the same way he did at school. He was a font of information: the answer man. Every now and then, he had a bad day. Madeleine would enter the dayroom to find him sullen, full of despair about not having graduated and concerned about his ability to handle his duties at Pilgrim Lake: the usual list of complaints. He repeated them over and over.

  Leonard hoped to stay in the hospital only a couple of weeks. But in the end he was there for twenty-two days. On the day of his release, in late June, Madeleine drove downtown to pick him up in her new car, a Saab convertible with twelve thousand miles on it. The car was a graduation present from her parents. “Even though we didn’t get to see you graduate,” Alton joked, discussing Madeleine’s disappearance that day. Among the throng of parents outside the Van Wickle gates, Alton and Phyllida had waited for Madeleine to march by; when she hadn’t, they thought they’d somehow missed her. After having searched for her on College Street, they’d tried calling her apartment, but got no answer. Finally, they stopped by and left a note for her, saying that they were worried and had decided not to go back to Prettybrook “as planned.” Instead, they were going to wait for her in the lobby of the Biltmore, which was where Madeleine found them that afternoon. She told them that she’d missed the march because Kelly Traub, with whom she’d been walking, had fallen and sprained her ankle, and she’d had to help her get to Health Services. Madeleine wasn’t sure if her parents believed her, but, relieved that she was all right, they hadn’t pressed her about it. Instead, Alton had called a few days later to instruct Madeleine to go out and buy herself a car. “Used,” he stipulated. “One or two years old. That way you escape a lot of the depreciation.” Madeleine had done as instructed, finding the convertible in the Pro-Jo classifieds. It was white, with fawn-colored bucket seats, and as she waited outside the hospital entrance, Madeleine put the top down so that Leonard could see her as the nurse brought him down in a wheelchair.

  “Nice ride,” he said, getting in.

  They hugged for a long time, Madeleine sniffling, until Leonard pulled away.

  “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of this place.”

  For the rest of the summer Leonard was touchingly fragile. He spoke in the softest of tones. He watched baseball on TV, holding Madeleine’s hand.

  “You know what paradise means?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t mean ‘paradise’?”

  “It means ‘walled garden.’ From the Arabic. That’s what a baseball stadium is. Especially Fenway. A walled garden. Look how green it is! It’s so soothing to just sit here and look at the field.”

  “Maybe you should watch golf,” Madeleine said.

  “Even greener.”

  The lithium made him thirsty all the time, and sporadically nauseated. He developed a mild tremor in his right hand. During his weeks in the hospital, Leonard had gained almost fifteen pounds, and he continued putting on weight all through July and August. His face and body looked puffy and there was a roll of fat, like a buffalo’s hump, on the back of his neck. Along with his thirst, Leonard had to pee constantly. He had stomachaches and suffered bouts of diarrhea. Worst of all, the lithium made his mind feel sluggish. Leonard claimed that there was an “upper register” that he couldn’t reach anymore, intellectually. To counteract this, he chewed even more tobacco, and started smoking cigarettes as well as smelly little cigars for which he’d developed a fondness in the hospital. His clothes reeked of smoke. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and of something else, too, a metallic chemical taste. Madeleine didn’t like it.

  As a result of all this, a side effect of the side effects, Leonard’s libido decreased. After making love twice or three times a day from the excitement of being reunited, they slowed down, and then nearly ceased having sex altogether. Madeleine wasn’t sure what to do. Should she pay more attention to Leonard’s problem, or less? She’d never been particularly hands-on, in bed. Life hadn’t required it. Guys hadn’t seemed to care, or to notice, being so hands-on themselves. One night, she attacked the problem as she might a
drop shot on the tennis court: she ran full out, getting there seemingly in time, then bent low and flicked her return—which hit the tape and fell back, dead, on her side of the court.

  She didn’t try again after that. She stayed back, playing her usual baseline game.

  All of this might have bothered Madeleine more if Leonard’s neediness hadn’t appealed to her so much. There was something pleasing about having her big Saint Bernard all to herself. He didn’t want to go out even to a movie anymore. Now he was interested only in his doggy bed, his doggy bowl, and his mistress. He laid his head on her lap, wanted to be petted. He wagged his tail whenever she came in. Always so demonstrably there, her big fuzz buddy, her big old slobbery fuzzeroo.

  Neither of them had a job. The long summer days passed slowly. With the student population gone, College Hill was somnolent and green. Leonard kept his medications in his Dopp kit under the bathroom sink. He always closed the door when taking them. Twice a week, he went to see his shrink, Bryce Ellis, and returned from these appointments emotionally abraded and exhausted. He flopped onto the mattress for another hour or two, and finally got up to put on a record.

  “You know how old Einstein was when he proposed the special theory of relativity?” he asked Madeleine one day.

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “So?”

  “Most scientists do their best work in their early twenties. I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three. I’m in my intellectual prime right now. Except that I have to take a drug every morning and every night that makes me stupid.”

  “It doesn’t make you stupid, Leonard.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “It doesn’t seem very scientific to me,” she said, “to decide you’ll never be a great scientist just because you haven’t discovered anything by the time you’re twenty-two.”