The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Those are the facts,” Leonard said. “Forget the drug. Even normal, I’m not remotely on a trajectory to make a scientific breakthrough.”

  “Say you don’t make a breakthrough,” Madeleine said. “How do you know you won’t come up with some tiny breakthrough that ends up benefiting people? I mean, maybe you won’t figure out that space is curved. Maybe you’ll find a way to make cars run on water so there won’t be any pollution.”

  “Inventing a hydrogen engine would constitute a major breakthrough,” Leonard said gloomily, lighting a cigarette.

  “O.K., but not every scientist was young. What about Galileo? How old was he? What about Edison?”

  “Can we not talk about this anymore?” Leonard said. “I’m getting depressed.”

  This made Madeleine quiet.

  Leonard took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled loudly. “Not depressed depressed,” he said, after a moment.

  As dedicated as Madeleine was to nursing Leonard, as satisfying as it was to see him getting better, she sometimes needed to get out of the stifling studio. To escape the humidity, she went to the air-conditioned library. She played tennis with two guys from the Brown tennis team. Some days, not wanting to go back to the apartment, Madeleine walked around the empty campus, trying her best to think about herself for a few minutes. She stopped in to see Professor Saunders, only to be troubled at the sight of the elderly scholar wearing shorts and sandals. She browsed the stacks at College Hill Bookstore, virtuously selecting used copies of Little Dorrit and The Vicar of Bullhampton, which she fully intended to read. Now and then she treated herself to an ice cream cone and sat on the steps of Hospital Trust, watching other young couples going by, holding hands or kissing. She finished her ice cream and started back to the apartment, where Leonard was waiting.

  All through July his condition remained delicate. By August, however, Leonard appeared to be turning the corner. Every now and then, he sounded like his old self. One morning, making toast, Leonard held up a package of Land O’Lakes butter. “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Who was the first person who noticed that the knees of the Land O’Lakes squaw look like breasts? Some guy in Terre Haute is having breakfast, and he looks at the butter package and thinks, ‘Check out those knees.’ But that’s only part of the story. After this insight, some other guy had to decide to cut out another pair of knees, from the back of the package, and to paste these behind the butter package the squaw’s holding in front of her chest, and then to cut around the edges of the butter package so that it flips up like she’s flashing her breasts. All this happened with no documentation whatsoever. The principals have been lost to history.”

  They started leaving the apartment. One day they drove to Federal Hill to have pizza. Afterward, Leonard insisted that they go into a cheese shop. It was dark inside, the shades drawn. The smell was a presence in the room. Behind the counter, an old white-haired man was busy doing something they couldn’t see. “It’s eighty degrees out,” Leonard whispered, “and this guy won’t open the windows. That’s because he’s got a perfect bacterial mix in here and he doesn’t want to let it out. I read a paper where these chemists from Cornell identified two hundred different strains of bacteria in a tub of rennet. It’s an aerobic reaction, so whatever’s in the air affects the flavor. Italians know all that instinctively. This guy doesn’t even know what he knows.”

  Leonard stepped up to the counter. “Vittorio, how are you?”

  The old man turned and squinted. “Hello, my friend! Where you been? I haven’t seen you long time.”

  “I was under the weather, Vittorio.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope. Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know. I got problems of my own.”

  “What do you recommend today?”

  “What do you mean ‘recommend.’ Cheese! Same as always. The best. Who’s your girlfriend?”

  “This is Madeleine.”

  “You like cheese, young lady? Here, taste. Take some home with you. And get rid of this guy. He’s no good.”

  Yet another revelation about Leonard: he was friends with the old Italian cheese maker on Federal Hill. Maybe that was where he’d been going when Madeleine used to see him waiting for the bus in the rain. To visit his friend Vittorio.

  At the end of August, they packed up their things, putting boxes in storage and cramming the rest into the trunk and backseat of the Saab, and lit out for the Cape. It was hot, in the nineties, and they drove with the top down all the way out of Rhode Island. The wind made it difficult to talk or listen to the stereo, however, so they put the top up as they crossed into Massachusetts. Madeleine had a Pure Prairie League tape that Leonard tolerated until they stopped at a gas station with a minimart, when he bought a cassette of Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits and played it the rest of the way over the Sagamore Bridge and onto the peninsula. At a roadside place in Orleans, they stopped for lobster rolls. Leonard seemed in good spirits. But, as they started driving again, scrub pines passing on either side, he began to nervously smoke his little cigars and to fidget in the passenger seat. It was a Sunday. Most traffic was headed in the opposite direction, weekenders or summer renters making their way back to the mainland, sports equipment roped to the roofs of their vehicles. In Truro, Highway 6 split into 6A, and they followed this carefully, slowing down when blue Pilgrim Lake appeared on their right. Near the lake’s end they saw the sign for Pilgrim Lake Laboratory and turned down a gravel drive that ran between dunes in the direction of Cape Cod Bay.

  “Who took my saliva?” Leonard said, as the buildings, where they were to live for the next nine months, appeared. “Do you have my saliva? Because I can’t find mine right now.”

  During their quick visit the previous spring, Madeleine had been too preoccupied with her new relationship to notice much more about Pilgrim Lake Laboratory than its beautiful beachfront location. It was amazing to think that legends like Watson and Crick had worked or stayed in the former whaling settlement, but most names of the biologists at Pilgrim Lake now—including the lab’s present director, David Malkiel—were new to her. The one actual laboratory they’d toured during that visit hadn’t looked much different from the chemistry labs at Lawrenceville.

  Once they’d moved up to Pilgrim Lake, however, and started living there, Madeleine realized how wrong her first impressions of the place had been. She hadn’t expected that there would be six indoor tennis courts, or a gym full of Nautilus equipment, or a screening room that showed first-run films on weekends. She hadn’t expected that the bar would be open twenty-four hours, or that it would be full of scientists at three in the morning, awaiting test results. She hadn’t expected the limousines ferrying pharmaceutical executives and celebrities in from Logan to eat with Dr. Malkiel in his private dining room. She hadn’t expected the food, the expensive French wines and breads and olive oils hand-selected by Dr. Malkiel himself. Malkiel raised huge sums of money for the lab, lavishing it on the resident scientists and luring others to visit. It was Malkiel who had bought the Cy Twombly painting that hung in the dining hall and who had commissioned the Richard Serra that stood behind the Animal House.

  Madeleine and Leonard arrived at Pilgrim Lake during the Summer Genetics Seminar. Leonard had to take the famous “Yeast Class,” taught by Bob Kilimnik, the biologist to whose team he’d been assigned. He went off every morning like a frightened schoolboy. He complained that his brain wasn’t working and that the other two research fellows on his team, Vikram Jaitly and Carl Beller, both of whom had gone to MIT, were smarter than he was. But it was just a two-hour class. The rest of the day was free. A relaxed atmosphere prevailed at the lab. A lot of undergraduates were around (called Urts, for undergraduate research technicians), including a lot of women close to Madeleine’s age. Almost every night there was a party where people did slightly queer, science-nerd things, such as serving daiquiris in Erlenmeyer flasks or evaporating dishes, or autoclaving clams instead of steaming them. Still, it was fun.

  After Lab
or Day, things grew more serious. The Urts left, radically decreasing the female population, bringing an end to the summer parties and the whiff of romance in the air. In late September, The Sunday Telegraph began publishing the odds from Ladbrokes on the upcoming Nobel Prizes. As the days passed and the other prizes in science were awarded—to Kenneth Wilson in Physics and to Aaron Klug in Chemistry—people began to speculate, at dinner, on who would win for Physiology or Medicine. The leading candidates were Rudyard Hill, of Cambridge, and Michael Zolodnek. Zolodnek was a resident at Pilgrim Lake, living in one of the saltboxes on the Truro side of the property. Then, in the early morning of October 8, a whooshing sound awoke Madeleine and Leonard from a sound sleep. Going to the window, they saw a helicopter landing on the beach in front of their building. Three satellite news vans were parked in the lot. They threw on clothes and raced to the conference center, where they learned, to their delight, that the Nobel had been awarded not to Michael Zolodnek but to Diane MacGregor. The seats in the amphitheater were already filled with press reporters and Pilgrim Lake staff. Standing in the back of the room, Madeleine and Leonard watched Dr. Malkiel escort MacGregor to a podium bedecked with a bouquet of microphones. MacGregor was dressed in an old raincoat and Wellies, exactly as she had been the few times Madeleine had caught sight of her on the beach, walking her black standard poodle. She’d made an attempt to arrange her white hair for the press conference. This detail, along with her diminutive size, gave her the quality of a small child, despite her age.

  At the podium MacGregor smiled, twinkled, and looked besieged all at once.

  The questions began:

  “Dr. MacGregor, where were you when you heard the news?”

  “I was asleep. Just like I am right now.”

  “Could you tell us what your scientific work is about?”

  “I could. But then you’d be asleep.”

  “What do you plan to do with the money?”

  “Spend it.”

  These answers would have given Madeleine a crush on Diane MacGregor if she hadn’t had one already. Though she’d never talked to MacGregor, everything she’d learned about the seventy-three-year-old recluse had turned MacGregor into Madeleine’s favorite biologist. Unlike the other scientists at the lab, MacGregor employed no assistants. She worked entirely alone, without sophisticated equipment, analyzing the mysterious patterns of coloration in the corn she grew in a plot of land behind her house. From talking to Leonard and other people, Madeleine understood the basics of MacGregor’s work—it had to do with gene transmission, and the way traits are copied, transposed, or deleted—but what she really admired was the solitary and determined way MacGregor carried it out. (If Madeleine ever became a biologist, Diane MacGregor would be the kind of biologist she would want to be.) Other scientists at the lab ridiculed MacGregor for not having a phone or for her general eccentricity. If MacGregor was so out of it, though, why did everyone have to talk about her all the time? Madeleine guessed that MacGregor made people uneasy because of the purity of her renunciation and the simplicity of her scientific method. They didn’t want her to succeed, because that would invalidate the rationale for their research staffs and bloated budgets. MacGregor could also be opinionated and blunt. People didn’t like that in anyone, but they liked it less in a woman. She’d been languishing in the biology department at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, when Dr. Malkiel’s predecessor, recognizing her genius, had raised the money to bring her to Pilgrim Lake and set her up with a lifetime position. That was the other thing that amazed Madeleine about MacGregor. She’d been at Pilgrim Lake since 1947! For thirty-five years she’d been inspecting her corn with Mendelian patience, receiving no encouragement or feedback on her work, just showing up every day, involved in her own process of discovery, forgotten by the world and not caring. And now, finally, this, the Nobel, the vindication of her life’s work, and though she seemed pleased enough, you could see that it hadn’t been the Prize she was after at all. MacGregor’s reward had been the work itself, the daily doing of it, the achievement made of a million unremarkable days.

  In her own small way, Madeleine understood what Diane MacGregor was up against at the male-dominated lab. At every dinner party she and Leonard went to, Madeleine inevitably ended up in the kitchen, helping with the other wives and girlfriends. She could have refused to do this, of course, but then she’d only look as if she was trying to prove a point. Also, it was annoying to sit and listen to the men’s competitive discussions. And so she washed dishes and ended up resenting it. Her only other social interactions were playing tennis with Malkiel’s young wife, Greta—who treated Madeleine like a hitting coach—or hanging out with the other bedfellows. That was the term used for the partners of the research fellows: bedfellows. Nearly every single research fellow was a guy. Most of the senior biologists were male as well, and so there was only Diane MacGregor, if you didn’t count the lab techs, for Madeleine to root for and to try, in her own fashion, to imitate.

  Considering that Leonard’s fellowship covered their food and lodging, there was no reason Madeleine couldn’t spend all her time reading, sleeping, and eating. But she had no intention of doing that. Despite her lack of focus over the summer, her future in academia had received a boost. Along with an A on her honors thesis, Madeleine had received a personal note from Professor Saunders encouraging her to turn her thesis into a shorter paper and to forward it to one M. Myerson at The Janeite Review. “It just may be publishable!” Saunders had written. Though the fact that M. Myerson was, in fact, Professor Saunders’s wife, Mary, lent an air of nepotism to this recommendation, an in was still an in. In Saunders’s office, when Madeleine had stopped by to see him, he had also loudly decried Yale’s rejection of her, saying that she’d been a victim of intellectual fashion.

  Then, on a mid-September weekend, Madeleine attended a conference on Victorian literature at Boston College that pointed her in a new direction. At the conference, which was held at a Hyatt with a greenery-filled lobby and tubular glass elevators, she met two people as crazy about nineteenth-century books as she was. Meg Jones was a fit college softball pitcher with pixieish hair and a strong jaw. Anne Wong was a ponytailed Stanford grad with an Elsa Peretti heart necklace, a Seiko watch, and a faint accent of her native Taiwan. Anne was currently in the poetry M.F.A. program at the University of Houston but was planning to get a Ph.D., in English, in order to make a living and satisfy her parents. Meg was already in the Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt. She called Austen “the divine Jane,” and spouted facts and figures about her like a sports bettor. There had been eight children in Austen’s family, Jane the youngest girl. She had suffered from Addison’s disease, like John F. Kennedy. She came down with typhus in 1783. Sense and Sensibility was originally published as Elinore and Marianne. Austen once accepted a proposal of marriage from a man named Bigg-Wither, but after sleeping on it, she changed her mind. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

  “Are you thinking of going into Austen studies?” Anne Wong asked Madeleine.

  “I don’t know. I had a chapter on her in my thesis. But you know who I’m also into? It’s a little embarrassing.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Gaskell.”

  “I love Mrs. Gaskell!” Anne Wong cried.

  “Mrs. Gaskell?” Meg Jones said. “I’m trying to think of something to reply to that.”

  What Madeleine sensed at the conference was the emergence of a new class of academics. They were talking about all the old books she loved, but in new ways. The topics included: “Women of Property in the Victorian Novel,” “Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question,” “Masturbation in Victorian Literature,” and “The Prison of Womanhood.” Madeleine and Anne Wong heard Terry Castle give a paper on “the invisible lesbian” in Victorian literature, and they glimpsed, from a distance, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar coming out of a “Madwoman in the Attic” talk where there were no seats left.

  The thing about the Victorians, Madeleine
was learning, was that they were a lot less Victorian than you thought. Frances Power Cobbe had lived openly with another woman, referring to her as her “wife.” In 1868, Cobbe had published an article in Fraser’s Magazine entitled “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors. Is the Classification Sound?” Women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain. They were restricted from participating in politics. And it was under these conditions, while they were classified literally among idiots, that Madeleine’s favorite women writers had written their books.

  Seen this way, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature, especially that written by women, was anything but old hat. Against tremendous odds, without anyone giving them the right to take up the pen or a proper education, women such as Anne Finch, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, and Emily Dickinson had taken up the pen anyway, not only joining in the grand literary project but, if you could believe Gilbert and Gubar, creating a new literature at the same time, playing a man’s game while subverting it. Two sentences from The Madwoman in the Attic particularly struck Madeleine. “In recent years, for instance, while male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism which Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ accurately describes, women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have probably not experienced its analog since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era. The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feels hopelessly belated; the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitely emerging.”

  Over two and a half days Madeleine and her new friends attended sixteen seminars. They snuck into a cocktail party for an insurance underwriters’ convention and ate free food. Anne kept ordering sex on the beach at the Hyatt bar, and giggling each time. Unlike Meg, who dressed like a longshoreman, Anne wore floral dresses from Filene’s Basement, and heels. On their last night, back in her room, Anne laid her head on Madeleine’s shoulder and confessed that she was still a virgin. “Not only Taiwanese!” she cried. “But a Taiwanese virgin! I’m hopeless!”