The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Four years ago, when Leonard had been officially diagnosed with manic depression in the spring semester of his freshman year, he hadn’t thought much about what the lithium was doing to him. He’d just wanted to get back to feeling normal. The diagnosis had seemed like one more thing—like lack of money, and his messed-up family—that had threatened to keep Leonard from getting ahead, just when he was beginning to feel that his luck had finally changed. He took his meds twice daily, like an A student. He started therapy, first seeing a mental health counselor at Health Services before finding Bryce Ellis, who took pity on Leonard’s student poverty and charged him on a sliding scale. For the next three years, Leonard treated his manic depression like a concentration requirement in something he wasn’t much interested in, doing the bare minimum to pass.

  Leonard had grown up in an Arts & Crafts house whose previous owner had been murdered in the front hall. The grisly history of 133 Linden Street had kept the house on the market for four years until Leonard’s father, Frank, bought it for half the original asking price. Frank Bankhead owned an antique-print shop on Nob Hill specializing in British lithographs. It was a terrible business, even back then, the shop a place where Frank could go during the days to smoke his pipe and wait for cocktail hour. Growing up, Leonard was made to understand by Frank that the Bankheads were “old Portland,” by which he meant the families who’d come to Oregon when it was still part of the Northwest Territory. There wasn’t much sign of this, no Bankhead Street downtown, not so much as an old signboard or a plaque saying “Bankhead” anywhere, or a bust of a Bankhead in the Oregon Historical Society. But there were Frank’s three-piece tweed suits, and his old-fashioned manners. There was his shop, full of things that no one wanted to buy: lithographs not of the city’s early days or anything that might interest a local, but of places like Bath or Cornwall or Glasgow. There were hunt prints, scenes of revelry in London taverns, sketches of pickpockets, two prize Hogarths that Frank could never part with, and a lot of junk.

  The print shop barely broke even. The Bankheads survived on dwindling income from stocks that Frank had inherited from his grandfather. Every so often, at an estate sale, he got his hands on a valuable print that he would then resell for a profit (sometimes flying to New York to do so). But the trajectory of the business was downward, in contrast to his social pretensions, and that was why Frank had got interested in the house.

  He first heard about it from a client who lived in the neighborhood. The previous owner, a bachelor named Joseph Wierznicki, had been knifed to death, just inside his front door, with such violence that the police had said the crime was “personal.” No one had been apprehended. The story had made the papers, complete with photos of the blood-spattered walls and flooring. And that might have been the end of it. In due course, the house was put on the market. Workers cleaned and refurbished the front hall. But a statute on the books requiring real estate agents to reveal any information that might affect resale obligated them to mention the house’s criminal history. When prospective buyers heard about the murder, they looked into it (if still interested), and, as soon as they saw the photographs, they declined to make offers.

  Leonard’s mother refused to even consider the idea. She didn’t think she could bear the strain of moving, especially into a haunted house. Rita spent most days in her bedroom, leafing through magazines or watching The Mike Douglas Show, her “water” glass on the bedside table. Every so often she became a whirlwind of domestic activity, decorating every inch of the house at Christmastime or cooking elaborate six-course dinners. For as long as Leonard could remember, his mother was either in retreat from other people or forcefully trying to impress them. The only other person he knew who was as unpredictable as Rita was Frank.

  That was a fun parlor game to play: from which side of the family had his mental instability descended. There were so many possible sources, so much spoiled fruit on the family trees of the Bankhead and Richardson clans. Alcoholics populated both sides. Rita’s sister, Ruth, had led a wild life, sexually and financially. She’d been arrested a few times and had attempted suicide at least once that he knew. Then there were Leonard’s grandparents, whose rectitude had something desperate about it, as though it was holding back a tide of riotous impulse. Despite his father’s buttoned-up appearance, Leonard knew him to be depressive as well as misanthropic, prone, when drunk, to ranting about “the vulgus” and to fits of grandiosity, where he talked about moving to Europe and living in high style.

  The house appealed to Frank’s conception of himself. It was a much nicer, bigger house than he could otherwise afford, with detailed woodwork in the parlor, a tiled fireplace, and four bedrooms. One afternoon, coming home from the shop early, he took Rita and Leonard to see it. When they arrived at the house, Rita refused to get out of the car. So Frank took Leonard, only seven at the time, in alone. They toured the house with the real estate agent, Frank pointing out where Leonard’s new bedroom would be on the first floor, and the backyard where, if he wanted, he could build a tree house.

  He brought Leonard back to the car, where Rita was sitting.

  “Leonard has something to tell you,” Frank said.

  “What?” Leonard said.

  “Don’t be smart. You know perfectly well what.”

  “There aren’t any bloodstains, Mom,” Leonard said.

  “And?” Frank coaxed.

  “The whole floor’s brand-new. In the front. It’s new tiles.”

  Rita remained straight-backed in the front seat. She was wearing sunglasses, as she always did when she went out, even in winter. Finally, she took a long sip from her “water” glass—it went everywhere with her, ice cubes jingling—and got out of the car.

  “Hold my hand,” she said to Leonard. Together, without Frank, they went up the front steps and across the porch into the house. They looked at all the rooms together.

  “What do you think?” Rita asked when they were finished.

  “It’s a nice house, I guess.”

  “It wouldn’t bother you living here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “She wants to move here. Dad told her what it’s like. He said she could pick out her own carpet.”

  Before giving her answer, Rita demanded that Frank take her to Bryant’s for dinner. Leonard wanted to go home and play baseball but they made him come along. At Bryant’s, Frank and Rita ordered martinis, quite a few of them. Before long they were laughing and kissing, and pooh-poohing Leonard’s reluctance to eat the oysters they ordered. Rita had suddenly decided that the murder was an attraction. It gave the house a “history.” In Europe, people were used to living in houses where other people had been murdered or poisoned.

  “I don’t know why you’re so scared to live there,” she chided Leonard.

  “I’m not scared,” he said.

  “I’ve never seen such a fuss, have you?” she asked Frank.

  “No, never,” Frank said.

  “I didn’t make a fuss,” Leonard said, growing frustrated. “You did. I don’t care where we live.”

  “Oh, well, maybe we won’t bring you with us, if you keep up that attitude!”

  They kept laughing and drinking, while Leonard stormed away from the table and stared into the jukebox, flipping the selections again and again.

  A month later, the family moved into 133 Linden, acquiring, along with the new house, one more thing for Frank and Rita to fight about.

  All of this, as Leonard later learned from his therapists, amounted to emotional abuse. Not to be made to live in a house where a murder had taken place but to be the go-between in his parents’ affairs, to be constantly asked his opinion before he was mature enough to give one, to be made to feel that he was somehow responsible for his parents’ happiness and, later, their unhappiness. Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he’d learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents’ fight
ing: his laziness, his over-achieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

  The next seven years were chaotic. There were constant parties at the house. Some antiques dealer from Cincinnati or Charleston was always in town and needed to be entertained. Frank presided over these soggy get-togethers, refilling everyone’s drinks, the adults carousing, shrieking, women falling out of their chairs, their dresses flying up. Middle-aged men wandered into Janet’s bedroom. Leonard and Janet had to serve drinks or hors d’oeuvres at these parties. On many nights, after the guests had left and sometimes while they were still there, arguments broke out, Frank and Rita shouting at each other. In their bedrooms on separate floors, Leonard and Janet turned up their stereos to drown out the noise. The fights were about money, Frank’s failure in business, Rita’s spending. By the time Leonard turned fifteen, his parents’ marriage was over. Frank left Rita for a Belgian woman named Sara Coorevits, an antiquities dealer from Brussels whom he’d met at a show in Manhattan and, it turned out, had been having an affair with for five years. A few months later, Frank sold the shop and moved to Europe, just as he always said he would. Rita retreated to her bedroom, leaving Janet and Leonard to get themselves through high school. Six months later, with creditors circling, Rita rather heroically bestirred herself to get a job at the local YMCA, becoming in time, somewhat miraculously, a director whom all the kids loved and called “Mrs. Rita.” She often worked late. Janet and Leonard made their own dinners and then went to their rooms. And it seemed like the thing that had been murdered in the house was their family.

  But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked: football, cheerleaders, James Taylor, red meat. A friend of his, Godfrey, was into bands like Lucifer’s Friend and Pentagram, and for a while Leonard spent a lot of time at Godfrey’s house listening to them. Since Godfrey’s parents couldn’t abide the infernal racket, Godfrey and Leonard listened with headphones. First Godfrey donned the set, lowered the needle on the record, and began to writhe in silence, indicating with his blown-away facial expressions the depth of the depravity he was being treated to. Then it was Leonard’s turn. They played songs backwards to hear the hidden satanic messages. They studied the dead-baby lyrics and putrescent cover art. In order to actually hear music at the same time, Leonard and Godfrey stole money from their parents and bought tickets to concerts at the Paramount. Waiting in line, in Portland’s constant drizzle, with a few hundred other maladjusted teens was the closest Leonard ever came to feeling part of something. They saw Nazareth, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Motordeath, a band that frankly sucked but whose shows featured naked women performing animal sacrifices. You could be a fan of darkness, a connoisseur of despair.

  For a while, the Disease—which was still nameless at the time—cooed to him. It said, Come closer. It flattered Leonard that he felt more than most people; he was more sensitive, deeper. Seeing an “intense” film like Mean Streets would leave Leonard stricken, unable to speak, and it would take three girls putting their arms around him for an hour to bring him back. Unconsciously, he began to milk his sensitivity. He was “really depressed” in study hall or “really depressed” at some party, and before long a group would form around him, looking concerned.

  He was a desultory student. Teachers labeled him “bright but unmotivated.” He blew off homework, preferring to lie on the couch and watch television. He watched The Tonight Show, the late movie, and the late-late movie. In the mornings he was exhausted. He fell asleep in class, reviving after school to screw around with his friends. Then he went back home, stayed up late again, watching TV, and the cycle repeated.

  And still this wasn’t the Disease. Being depressed about the state of the world—air pollution, mass starvation, the invasion of East Timor—wasn’t the Disease. Going into the bathroom and staring at his face, noticing the ghoulish veins beneath his skin, checking out his nose pores until he was convinced that he was a hideous creature whom no girl could ever love—even this wasn’t the Disease. This was a characterological prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

  Leonard suffered his first real bout of depression in the fall of his sophomore year of high school. One Thursday night, Godfrey, who’d just gotten his license, came by in his parents’ Honda and picked Leonard up. They drove around with the stereo cranked. Godfrey had gone soft on him. He insisted on listening to Steely Dan.

  “This is bullshit,” Leonard said.

  “No, man, you’ve got to give it a chance.”

  “Let’s listen to some Sabbath.”

  “I’m not into that stuff anymore.”

  Leonard regarded his friend. “What’s your deal?” he said, though he knew the answer already. Godfrey’s parents were religious (not Methodist, like Leonard’s family, but people who actually read the Bible). They’d sent Godfrey to a church camp over the summer and there, amid the trees and the woodpeckers, the ministers had done their work on him. He would still drink and smoke pot but he’d given up his Judas Priest and his Motordeath. Leonard didn’t mind that, so much. He was getting sick of that stuff himself. But that didn’t mean he was going to let Godfrey off the hook.

  He gestured toward the eight-track player. “This stuff is fey.”

  “The musicianship’s really good on this album,” Godfrey insisted. “Donald Fagen was classically trained.”

  “Let me tell you something, God-frey, if we’re going to drive around, listening to this pussy shit, I might as well drop trou and let you blow me now.”

  With that, Leonard searched the glove box for something more appealing, coming up with a Big Star album of which he was quite fond.

  A little before midnight, Godfrey dropped him at his house and Leonard went inside and straight to bed. When he woke up the next morning, something was the matter with him. His body ached. His limbs felt encased in cement. He didn’t want to get up, but Rita came in, barking that he was going to be late. Somehow Leonard managed to climb out of bed and get dressed. Skipping breakfast, he left the house, forgetting his backpack, and walked to Cleveland High. A storm was moving in, the light crepuscular over the dingy shop fronts and overpasses. All day, as Leonard carted his body from class to class, ominous, bruise-colored clouds massed outside the windows. Teachers kept bitching at him for not having his books. He had to borrow paper and pens from other students. Twice, he shut himself into a bathroom stall and, for no discernible reason, began to weep. Godfrey, who’d had as much to drink as Leonard had, seemed just fine. They went to lunch together but Leonard had no appetite.

  “What’s the matter with you, man? Are you stoned?”

  “No. I think I’m getting sick.”

  At three-thirty, instead of showing up for J.V. football practice, Leonard went straight home. A sense of impending doom, of universal malevolence, pursued him the entire way. Tree limbs gesticulated menacingly in his peripheral vision. Telephone lines sagged like pythons between the poles. When he looked up at the sky, however, he was surprised to find that it was cloudless. No storm. Clear weather, the sun pouring down. He decided that there was something wrong with his eyes.

  In his bedroom, he got down his medical books, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. He’d bought an entire set at a garage sale, six huge color-illustrated textbooks with deliciously gruesome titles: Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney, Atlas of Diseases of the Brain, Atlas of Diseases of the Skin, and so on. The medical books were what first got Leonard interested in biology. The photographs of anonymous sufferers exerted a morbid attraction for him. He liked to show particularl
y gross pictures to Janet to make her scream. Atlas of Diseases of the Skin was best for that.

  Even with the lights on in his bedroom, Leonard couldn’t see that well. He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light. In Atlas of Diseases of the Endocrine System he came across something called a pituitary adenoma. This was a tumor, typically small, that formed in the pituitary gland, often pressing on the optic nerve. It caused blindness and altered pituitary function. This led, in turn, to “low blood pressure, fatigue, and the inability to handle difficult or stressful situations.” Too much pituitary function and you became a giant, too little and you were a nervous wreck. As impossible as it sounded, Leonard seemed to be suffering both states at once.

  He closed the book and collapsed on his bed. He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

  When Rita returned home that evening to find Leonard, fully dressed, in bed, she told him to get ready for dinner. When he said he wasn’t hungry she set one less place at the table. She didn’t go into his room again that night.

  From his first-floor bedroom, Leonard could hear his mother and sister discussing him as they ate. Janet, not usually his supporter, asked what was wrong with him. Rita said, “Nothing. He’s just lazy.” He heard them doing the dishes, Janet going into her room after dinner and talking on the telephone.

  The next morning, Rita sent Janet in to check on him. She came to the edge of his bed.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Even this little show of sympathy made Leonard want to burst into tears again. He had to struggle not to, covering his face with one arm.