The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Are you faking?” Janet whispered.

  “No,” he managed to get out.

  “It smells in here.”

  “Then leave,” Leonard said, even though he wanted her to stay, wanted more than anything for his sister to crawl in beside him like she used to do when they were little.

  He heard Janet’s footsteps cross the room and go down the hall. He heard her say, “Mom, I think he’s really sick.”

  “Probably he has a test he didn’t study for,” Rita said, cackling mirthlessly.

  Soon they left and the house was quiet.

  Leonard lay under blankets, entombed. The bad smell Janet had detected was his body rotting. His back and face were covered with zits. He needed to get up and wash himself with pHisoderm but he didn’t have the energy.

  In the corner of his room was his old table hockey set, the Bruins against the Blackhawks. As a twelve-year-old Leonard had mastered the skills required to beat his older sister and all his friends. He insisted on always being the Bruins. He’d made up names for each player, one Italian, one Irish, one American Indian, and one French Canadian. He’d kept stats on each player in a notebook reserved for that purpose, with a drawing of a hockey stick and a flaming puck on the front. As he played the game, sliding the metal rods to move the players around the ice and flicking the knobs to shoot, Leonard gave a running commentary. “DiMaglio takes the puck off the glass. He passes it to McCormick. McCormick gives it to Sleeping Bear, who passes it to Lecour, who shoots AND SCORES!” On and on, in his piercing, prepubescent voice, Leonard narrated his lopsided victories, jotting down Lecour’s goals and Sleeping Bear’s assists before he forgot. He obsessed over the stats, eager to run up Lecour’s goal tally even by playing Janet, who could barely operate the controls. How Janet hated playing table hockey with Leonard! And how justified she had been, he saw now. All Leonard cared about was winning. Winning made him feel good, or at least better, about himself. It didn’t matter if the other person could play or not.

  The Disease, which otherwise distorted his perception, brought such personality defects into painful clarity.

  But it wasn’t just himself Leonard despised. He hated the jocks at school, he hated the Portland “pigs” in their cruisers, the 7-Eleven clerk who told Leonard that if he wanted to read Rolling Stone he had to buy it; he hated any and all politicians, businessmen, gun owners, Bible-thumpers, hippies, fat people, the reintroduction of the death penalty in the execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore in Utah, the entire state of Utah, the Philadelphia 76ers for beating the Portland Trailblazers, and Anita Bryant most of all.

  He missed the next week of school. But by the end of the following weekend he was up and around again. This had largely to do with the appearance of Godfrey outside Leonard’s bedroom window on Friday afternoon. Around three-thirty that day, Janet came home from school, dropping her books on the kitchen table. A few minutes later, Leonard smelled her heating up a mini frozen pizza in the toaster oven. Soon she was on the phone to her boyfriend. Leonard was listening to his sister, thinking how fake she sounded and how Jimmy, her boyfriend, didn’t know what she was really like, when someone tapped on his bedroom window. It was Godfrey. When he saw Godfrey out there, Leonard wondered if maybe he wasn’t as depressed as he thought. He was happy to see his friend. He forgot about everything in the world that he hated, and got up to open the window.

  “You could use the front door,” Leonard said.

  “Not me,” Godfrey said, climbing in the window. “I’m strictly a back-door man.”

  “You should try the old lady next door. She’s waiting for you right now.”

  “How about your sister?”

  “O.K., you can leave now.”

  “I’ve got weed,” Godfrey said.

  He held up the baggie. Leonard stuck his nose into the bag and his depression lifted another notch. It smelled like the Amazonian rain forest, like putting your head between the legs of a native girl who had never heard of Christianity. They went out behind the garage to smoke some of it up, standing under the roof overhang to stay out of the rain. And that was where, figuratively, Leonard pretty much stayed for the remainder of high school, under an overhang, smoking pot in the drizzle. It was always raining in Portland and there was always an overhang nearby, behind the school, under the Steel Bridge in Waterfront Park, or beneath the leaky branches of a wind-desolated white pine in somebody’s backyard. Leonard wasn’t sure how he managed it, but somehow he dragged himself back to school the following Monday. He got used to crying secretly in the bathroom at least twice a day and to pretending to be all right when he came out. Without knowing what he was doing he began self-medicating, getting stoned most every day, drinking tall-boys at his or Godfrey’s house in the afternoons, going to parties on the weekends and getting totally baked. The house was party central every weekday afternoon. Kids came by with six-packs and weed. They always wanted to hear about the murder. Leonard embellished on the tale, saying that there were still bloodstains when they moved in. “Hey, they might still be there if you look close.” Janet fled these parties as if from raw sewage. She always threatened to tell but never did. By five o’clock Leonard and his friends were out in the alleys, riding their skate-boards and crashing into things, laughing hysterically at spectacular wipeouts.

  None of this represented mental health, but it got him through. The Disease wasn’t yet well established in him. It was possible to anesthetize himself during his days or weeks of depression.

  And then an amazing thing happened. In his junior year, Leonard started getting his act together. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was that Janet had left for Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington, at the end of August, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland. Though they’d mostly ignored each other growing up, Leonard found the house lonely without her. Janet’s departure made living at home that much more unbearable. And it showed him a way out.

  It was a chicken-egg deal. Leonard could never tell which came first, his desire to become a better student or the energy and focus that allowed him to do so. From that September on, he threw himself into his studies. He began to finish his reading assignments and to turn in essays on time. He paid the bare minimum attention it took for him to get A’s on math exams. He did well in chemistry, though he preferred biology, which seemed to him more tangible, more “human,” somehow. As Leonard’s grades improved, he was put in advanced classes, which he found even more to his liking. It was fun to be one of the smart kids. In English, they were reading Henry IV, Part 2. Leonard couldn’t help but secretly identify with Henry’s speech of farewell to his former life of laxity. Though seriously behind in math at the start of the year, by the time he took the SATs, in the spring, he was more than caught up, and aced both the math and verbal sections. He discovered in himself a capacity for unbroken concentration, studying for ten hours at a time, taking breaks only to wolf down a sandwich. He started finishing papers early. He read Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Ever Since Darwin just because he was interested. He wrote Gould a fan letter and received a postcard back from the great biologist. “Dear Leonard, Thank you for your letter. Keep sluggin’. S. J. Gould.” On the front was a portrait of Darwin in the National Portrait Gallery. Leonard hung it over his desk.

  Two years later, when Leonard could look back with the benefit of a medical finding, he came to suspect that he’d spent his last two years in high school in a condition of borderline mania. Every time he reached for a word, it was there. Whenever he needed to make an argument, entire paragraphs formed in his head. He could just open up in class and keep going, while also making people laugh. Even better, his new confidence and achievement allowed him to be generous. He excelled at school without showing off, his unbearable table-hockey persona nowhere in evidence. With schoolwork coming so easily to him, Leonard had time to help his friends with their work, never making them feel bad about their difficulties, explaining math patiently to kids who had no
clue about math. Leonard felt better than he’d ever felt in his life. His grade point average went from 2.9 to 3.7 in a single semester. Senior year, he took four A.P.s, getting 5s in biology, English, and history, and a 4 in Spanish. Was it a bad thing that his blood contained an antidote to the depression he’d suffered the previous spring? Well, if so, nobody was complaining, not his teachers, not his mother, and certainly not the college counselor at Cleveland High School. In fact, it was the memory of his last two years in high school, when the Disease hadn’t yet grown fangs and was more of a blessing than a curse, that had given Leonard the idea for his brilliant move.

  Leonard applied to three schools, all in the East because the East was far away. The school he got into that gave him the most financial aid was Brown, a place he didn’t know much about but which had been recommended by his counselor. After a lot of long-distance wrangling on the phone with Frank, who was now complaining about European tax rates and pleading poverty, Leonard succeeded in getting his father to agree to pay for his room and board. At that point he sent in his letter of acceptance to Brown.

  Once it was clear that Leonard was going far away, Rita tried to make up for lost time. She took a week off work to go on a road trip with Leonard. They drove to Walla Walla to see Janet, who’d stayed at Whitman for the summer, working in the college library. Rita surprised Leonard by tearing up at the wheel, telling him how proud she was of him. As though he was already a mature adult, Leonard suddenly understood the dynamic between himself and Rita. He understood that she had been naturally fonder of Janet, felt guilty about this, and found fault with him to justify her prejudice. He understood that, as a male, Leonard reminded Rita of Frank, and that she either consciously or unconsciously held him at a slight distance as a result. He understood that he had unwittingly assumed Frank’s attitudes, belittling Rita in his private thoughts the way Frank had done out loud. In short, Leonard understood that his entire relationship with his mother had been determined by a person who was no longer around.

  On the day he left for Providence, Rita drove him to the airport. They waited in the lounge together before his flight. Rita, in sunglasses, big and round in the latest style, and with a chiffon scarf tied over her hair, sat with sphinx-like immobility.

  “That college you picked sure is a long way away,” she said. “Should I take it personally?”

  “It’s a good school,” Leonard said.

  “It’s not Harvard,” Rita said. “Nobody’s heard of it.”

  “It’s Ivy League!” Leonard protested.

  “Your father cares about things like that. Not me.”

  Leonard wanted to get mad at her. But he understood, with that new grown-up brain of his, that Rita was denigrating his new college only because it was something that he wanted that wasn’t her. For a moment, he saw things from her perspective. First Frank had left her, then Janet, and now him. Rita was all alone.

  He stopped thinking about this because it was making him sad. As soon as he could, he got up, hugged his mother, and headed down the concourse.

  Leonard didn’t shed a tear until he’d taken his seat on the airplane. He turned to the window, hiding his face. The takeoff thrilled him—the sheer force of it. He stared out at the jet engine, marveling at the thrust required to rip him from the earth at such great speed. Sitting back, closing his eyes, he urged the engines on, as though they were doing a necessary violence. He didn’t look out the window again until Portland was long gone.

  At first, everyone Leonard met at college seemed to be from the East Coast. His roommate, Luke Miller, was from D.C. The girls across the hall, Jennifer Talbot and Stephanie Friedman, were from New York City and Philly, respectively. The rest of the people on his hall were from Teaneck, Stamford, Amherst, Portland (Maine), and Cold Spring. His third week on campus, Leonard met Lola Lopez, a Bambi-faced girl with a caramel complexion and a tidy afro, who was from Spanish Harlem. She was sitting in the quad, reading Zora Neale Hurston, when Leonard pretended to need directions to the Ratty. He asked her where she was from and what her name was, and when she told him, he asked her what the difference was between Spanish Harlem and regular Harlem. “I have to finish this for class,” Lola said, and went back to her book.

  The only West Coasters Leonard met were from California, which was another planet. “Keep California Dis-Oregonized,” read many a bumper sticker on cars with Golden State plates, to which their neighbors replied with a motto of their own: “Welcome to Oregon. Enjoy Your Visit. Now Go Home.” But at least the Californians Leonard met at school knew where he was from. Everyone else, from the South, Northeast, or Midwest, just asked about the rain. “Doesn’t it rain a lot there?” “I hear it rains all the time.” “How do you like the rain out there?”

  “It’s not as bad as Seattle,” Leonard told them.

  It didn’t bother him much. He’d turned eighteen in August and the Disease, as though waiting for him to reach legal drinking age, began to flood him with intoxicants. Two things mania did were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college. Leonard studied at the Rockefeller Library every night until midnight, like a yeshiva student davening over the Torah. At the stroke of twelve he headed back to West Quad, where there was always a party going on, usually in his room. Miller, a Milton grad who’d already had four years away from home to refine his Dionysian methods, bolted two huge Burmester speakers to the ceiling. He kept an industrial-size canister of nitrous oxide like a silver torpedo in the corner by his bed. Any girl who sucked on the rubber hose inevitably fainted into your arms like a damsel in distress. Leonard found he didn’t need such stratagems. Without really trying, he had grown into the thing girls wanted. By December, he began hearing reports of a list in the girls’ bathroom in Airport Lounge, a list of the cutest guys on campus that included his name. One night Miller delivered a note from a punked-out English girl named Gwyneth, with dyed red hair and witchy black fingernails. The note said, “I want your bod.”

  She got it. So did everybody else. A representative image of Leonard’s freshman year would be of a guy lifting his head from an act of cunnilingus long enough to take a bong hit and give a correct answer in class. Not sleeping made it easier to two-time somebody. You could leave one girl’s bed at five a.m., cross campus, and slide into bed with somebody else. Everything went fine, Leonard’s grades were good, he was absorbed intellectually and erotically—until he went without sleep for a week during Reading Period. After his last exam, he threw a party in his room, passed out in bed with a girl he couldn’t recognize the next morning, not because he didn’t know her (the girl was, in fact, Lola Lopez) but because the ensuing depression had blinded him to everything but his agony. It colonized every cell of his body, a concentrate of anguish seemingly secreted, drip by drip, into his veins like a toxic by-product of the previous days of mania.

  True mania, this time. So many magnitudes beyond the exhilarated spirits of his high school days that it bore little resemblance. Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year’s fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, “Come on. One more!” When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn’t stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let’s drive down to New York! Tonight! Let’s climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood
what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who’d been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue …

  Like a drunk on a bender, Leonard had a blackout afterward. He woke up next to Lola Lopez in a state of utter collapse. Lola managed to get him up, however. She led him by the arm to Health Services, telling him not to worry, to hold on to her and that he’d be all right.

  It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital, when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be “managed,” as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

  In September, when Madeleine and Leonard were newly arrived at Pilgrim Lake, the dune grass was a lovely shade of light green. It waved and bent as if the landscape were a painted Japanese screen. Saltwater rivulets trickled through the marshes, and scrub pines clustered together in discreet groves. The world reduced itself, here, to basic constituents—sand, sea, sky—keeping trees and flower species to a minimum.

  As the summer people left and the weather turned colder, the purity of the landscape only increased. The dunes turned a shade of gray that matched the sky. The days grew noticeably shorter. It was the perfect environment for depression. It was dark when Leonard got up in the morning and dark when he returned from the lab. His neck was so fat he couldn’t button his shirt collars. The proof that lithium stabilized one’s mood was confirmed every time Leonard saw himself naked in the mirror and didn’t kill himself. He wanted to. He thought he had every right. But he couldn’t work up the requisite self-loathing.

  This should have made him feel good, but feeling “good” was also out of reach. Both his highs and his lows were evened out, leaving him feeling as though he lived in two dimensions. He was on an increased daily dose of lithium, 1,800 milligrams, with correspondingly severe complications. When he complained to Dr. Perlmann at his weekly appointment at Mass General, an hour and a half away, the natty, shiny-headed psychiatrist always said the same thing: “Be patient.” Perlmann seemed more interested in Leonard’s life at Pilgrim Lake Lab than in the fact that his signature now looked like that of a ninety-year-old. Perlmann wanted to know what Dr. Malkiel was like. He wanted to hear gossip. If Leonard had stayed in Providence, under the care of Dr. Shieu, he would have already been on a lower dose, but now he was back to square one.