The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  In the library at Pilgrim Lake, Leonard tried to learn more about the drug he was on. Reading at the pace of a second-grader, effectively moving his lips, Leonard learned that lithium salts had been used for mood disorders as far back as the nineteenth century. Then, largely because people couldn’t patent it to make money, the therapy had fallen out of favor. Lithium had been used to treat gout, hypertension, and heart disease. It had been the key ingredient in 7 Up (originally named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda) until the 1950s. At the moment, clinical trials were under way to test lithium’s efficacy in treating Huntington’s chorea, Tourette’s syndrome, migraine and cluster headache, Ménière’s disease, and hypokalemic periodic paralysis. The drug companies had it the wrong way around. Instead of starting with an illness and developing a drug to treat it, they developed drugs and then tried to figure out what they were good for.

  What Leonard knew about lithium without reading was that it made him torpid and fuzzy-brained. His mouth was always dry, no matter how much he drank, and tasted as if he were sucking on a steel screw. One of the reasons he chewed tobacco was to cover the metallic taste. Due to the tremors in his hands, he had no coordination (he couldn’t play Ping-Pong, anymore, or even catch a ball). And, though all his doctors insisted that the lithium wasn’t at fault, Leonard’s sex drive was much reduced. He wasn’t impotent or unable to perform; he just didn’t have a lot of interest. Probably this had to do with how unattractive and prematurely old the drug made him feel. At the Provincetown pharmacy, Leonard went shopping not only for razor blades but also for Mylanta and Preparation H. He was always coming out of the drugstore clutching a little plastic bag, scared the bag’s transparency would reveal the embarrassing product inside, and so holding it even tighter against his little titties in the Cape Cod wind. Leonard patronized the P-town pharmacy in order to avoid the convenience store at the lab, where he ran the risk of running into someone he knew. To keep Madeleine from going with him, he had to come up with an excuse, the most unassailable of which, of course, was his manic depression. He didn’t invoke it outright. He just mumbled that he wanted to be alone, and Madeleine backed off.

  As a consequence of his physical and mental malfunctioning, there was another problem he was dealing with: the power had shifted in his relationship with Madeleine. Early on, Madeleine had been the needy one. She got jealous when Leonard talked to other girls at parties. She flashed warning signs of insecurity. Finally, she’d thrown in the towel completely and told him, “I love you.” In response, Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely. But Madeleine surprised him. She broke up with him on the spot. Once Madeleine was gone, Leonard regretted the Roland Barthes incident. He castigated himself for being such a douche. He spent multiple sessions with Bryce examining his motivations. And though Bryce’s analysis of the situation—that Leonard was frightened of intimacy and so had self-protectively made fun of Madeleine’s avowal—was pretty much on the mark, that didn’t bring Madeleine back. Leonard missed her. He got depressed. Stupidly, he stopped taking his lithium, hoping to feel better. But all he felt was anxious. Anxious and depressed. He wore out the ear of every friend he had, talking incessantly about how much he missed Madeleine, how he wanted her back, and how he’d messed up the best relationship he’d ever had. Knowing that his friends were getting tired of hearing this, Leonard modulated his monologues, partly out of a storyteller’s instinct to vary a narrative and partly because, by then, his anxieties were multiplying. So he told his friends about his money worries and his health worries until he finally lost track of what he was saying and to whom he was saying it. Around this time Ken Auerbach had shown up, with two guys from security, and taken him to Health Services. And the really crazy thing was that, when he was transferred to the hospital the next day, Leonard was pissed. He was pissed at being admitted to the psych ward without enjoying the prior benefit of a total manic blowout. He should have been up for three nights running. He should have fucked eight chicks and snorted blow and done jelly shots off the stomach of a stripper named Moonstar. Instead, all Leonard had done was sit in his apartment, abusing his Rolodex, wearing out his telephonic welcome, and spiraling down until he ended in medical lockup with the other head cases.

  By the time he got out, three weeks later, the power dynamics had completely reversed. Now he was the needy one. True, he had Madeleine back, which was a wonderful thing. But Leonard’s happiness was compromised by the constant fear of losing her again. His unsightliness threw Madeleine’s beauty into relief. Next to her in bed, he felt like a pudgy eunuch. Every hair on his thighs sprouted from an inflamed follicle. Sometimes, when Madeleine was asleep, Leonard would gently pull the covers off her to stare at her glowing, rosy skin. What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency was what Leonard had guarded himself against feeling all his life, but he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d lost the ability to be an asshole. Now he was smitten, and it felt both tremendous and scary.

  Madeleine had tried to brighten up his studio while he was in the hospital. She’d put new sheets on the bed and had hung curtains in the windows and a pink shower curtain. She’d scrubbed the floors and counters. She professed to be glad to be living with him and to be rid of Olivia and Abby. But during the long, hot summer, Leonard began to see why Madeleine might eventually tire of slumming it with her nearly penniless boyfriend. Whenever a roach scurried out of the toaster, she looked as though she was going to be sick. She wore sandals in the shower to protect herself from the mildew. The first week after Leonard was back, Madeleine stayed with him every day. But the week after that she began going out to the library or to see her old thesis advisor. Leonard didn’t like Madeleine to leave the apartment. He suspected the reason she went out wasn’t because she loved Jane Austen or Professor Saunders, but to get away from him. In addition to going to the library, Madeleine played tennis two or three times a week. One day, trying to convince her not to go, Leonard said that it was too hot out to play tennis. He suggested she go to an air-conditioned movie with him instead.

  “I need some exercise,” Madeleine said.

  “I’ll give you some exercise,” he boasted emptily.

  “Not that kind.”

  “How come you always play with guys?”

  “Because guys can beat me. I need some competition.”

  “If I said that, you’d call me sexist.”

  “Look, if Chrissie Evert lived in Providence, I’d play her. But all the girls I know here stink.”

  Leonard knew what he sounded like. He sounded like every drag of a girlfriend he’d ever had. In order to stop sounding that way, he pouted, and, in the following silence, Madeleine gathered her racquet and can of balls and left.

  As soon as Madeleine was gone he leapt up and ran to the window. He watched her leave the building in her tennis whites, her hair tied back, a sweatband around the wrist of her serving arm.

  There was something about tennis—its aristocratic rituals, the prim silence it enforced on its spectators, the pretentious insistence on saying “love” for zero and “deuce” for tied, the exclusivity of the court itself, where only two people were allowed to move freely, the palace-guard rigidity of the linesmen, and the slavish scurrying of the ball boys—that made it clearly a reproachable pastime. That Leonard couldn’t say this to Madeleine without making her angry suggested the depth of the social chasm between them. There was a public tennis court near his house in Portland, old and cracked, half-flooded most of the time. He and Godfrey used to go out there to smoke weed. That was as close as Leonard got to playing tennis. By contrast, for two solid weeks in June and July, Madeleine got up every morning to watch Breakfast at Wimbledon on her portable Trinitron, which she’d installed in Leonard’s apartment. From the mattress, Leonard groggily watched her nibble English muffins while she watched the matches. That was where Madeleine belonged: at Wimbledon, on
Centre Court, curtseying for the queen.

  He watched her watching Wimbledon. It made him happy to see her there. He didn’t want her to leave. If Madeleine left, he would be alone again, as he’d been growing up in a house with his family, as he was in his head and often in his dreams, and as he’d been in his room at the psych ward.

  He barely remembered his first days at the hospital. They put him on Thorazine, an antipsychotic that knocked him out. He slept for fourteen hours. Before he was admitted, the head nurse had taken Leonard’s sharps from his overnight bag (his razor, his toenail clippers). She took away his belt. She asked him if he had any valuables, and Leonard handed over his wallet, containing six dollars.

  He awoke in a small room, a single, without a phone or a TV. At first, it looked like a normal hospital room, but then he began to notice little differences. The bed frame and the hinges of the bedside tray were welded together, without screws or bolts that a patient might take apart and cut himself with. The hook on the door wasn’t fixed in place but attached to a bungee cord that stretched under excess weight, to prevent someone hanging himself on it. Leonard wasn’t allowed to close the door. There was no lock on the door, or on any doors in the unit, including the bathroom stalls. Surveillance was a central feature of the psych ward: he was constantly aware of being watched. Oddly, this was reassuring. The nurses weren’t surprised by the state he was in. They didn’t think he was to blame. They treated Leonard as if he’d injured himself in a fall or a car accident. Their half-bored ministrations probably did more than anything—even the drugs—to get Leonard through those first dark days.

  Leonard was a “self-admit,” meaning that he could leave anytime he wanted. He’d signed a consent form, however, agreeing to give the hospital twenty-four-hour notice before doing so. He consented to be given medications, to abide by the rules of the unit, to uphold standards of cleanliness and hygiene. He signed whatever they put in front of him. Once a week, he was allowed to shave. A nurse’s aid brought him a disposable razor, standing by while he used it, and then took it back. They kept him on a strict schedule, getting him up at six a.m. for breakfast and ushering him through a series of daily activities, therapy, group therapy, crafts class, more group therapy, gym, before visiting hours in the afternoon. Lights were out at nine p.m.

  Every day, Dr. Shieu stopped by to talk. Shieu was a small woman with papery skin and an alert demeanor. She seemed interested mainly in one thing: whether Leonard was suicidal or not.

  “Good morning, Leonard, how are you feeling today?”

  “Exhausted. Depressed.”

  “Are you feeling suicidal?”

  “Not actively.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No.”

  “Any plans?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you planning to harm yourself? Fantasizing about it? Going over scenarios in your head?”

  “No.”

  Manic-depressives, it turned out, were at a higher risk for suicide than depressives. Dr. Shieu’s number one priority was to keep her patients alive. Her second priority was to get them well enough to leave the hospital before their insurance benefits ran out in thirty days. Her pursuit of these objectives (which ironically mimicked the tunnel vision of mania itself) led to a strong reliance on drug therapy. She automatically placed schizophrenic patients on Thorazine, a drug people likened to a “chemical lobotomy.” Everyone else received sedatives and mood stabilizers. Leonard spent his morning therapy sessions with the psychiatric resident discussing all the stuff he, Leonard, was on. How was he “tolerating” the valium? Was it making him nauseated? Constipated? Yes. Thorazine could cause tardive dyskinesia (repetitive motions, often involving the mouth and lips), but this was often temporary. The resident prescribed additional medications to counteract Leonard’s side effects and, without asking him how he was feeling, sent him on his way.

  The clinical psychologist, Wendy Neuman, was at least interested in Leonard’s emotional history, but he saw her only for group therapy. Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse. There were older white guys with M.I.A. tattoos and black dudes who played chess all day, a middle-aged female accounts clerk who drank as much as an English rugby team, and one small young woman, an aspiring singer, whose mental illness took the form of a desire to have her right leg amputated. To stimulate discussion, they passed a book around, a battered hardback with a split spine. The book was called Out of Darkness, Light and contained personal testimonies of people who had recovered from mental illnesses or had learned to cope with a chronic diagnosis. It was borderline religious while professing not to be. They sat in the unkind fluorescence of the meeting room, each reading a paragraph aloud before handing it to the next person. Some people treated the book as if it were a mysterious object. They mispronounced deity. They didn’t know what cur meant. The book was badly out of date. Some contributors referred to depression as “the blues” or “the black dog.” When the book came to him, Leonard read off his paragraph with a cadence and diction that made it clear he’d come to the hospital straight from College Hill. He was under the impression, those first days, that mental illness admitted of hierarchy, that he was a superior form of manic-depressive. If dealing with a mental illness consisted of two parts, one part medication and the other therapy, and if therapy proceeded faster the smarter you were, then many people in the group were at a disadvantage. They could barely remember what had happened in their lives, much less draw connections between events. One guy had a facial tic so pronounced that it seemed to literally shake coherent thoughts from his head. He would twitch and forget what he’d been saying. His problems were physiological, the basic wiring of his brain faulty. Listening to him was like listening to a radio tuned between channels: every so often a non sequitur came barking in. Leonard paid sympathetic attention as people spoke about their lives. He tried to take comfort in what they said. But his main thought was of how much worse off they were than he. This belief made him feel better about himself, and so he clung to it. But then it was Leonard’s turn to tell his story, and he opened his mouth and out came the most nicely modulated, well-articulated bullshit imaginable. He talked about the events that led up to his breakdown. He recited swaths of the DSM III that he’d apparently committed to memory without trying. He showed off how smart he was because that was what he was used to doing. He couldn’t stop himself.

  That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up. As he was speaking, for instance, Leonard noticed Wendy Neuman cross her arms over her chest, as if to defend herself against the blatant insincerity of what he was saying. To win her back, Leonard admitted to this insincerity, saying, “No, I take that back. I’m lying. Lying is what I do. It’s part of my disease.” He eyed Wendy to see if she was buying this, or if she regarded it as further insincerity. The closer Leonard monitored her reactions, the further he got from telling the truth about himself, until he trailed off, feeling embarrassed and hot-faced, an eyesore of denial.

  The same thing happened in his sessions with Dr. Shieu, but in a different way. Sitting in the scratchy armchair in Shieu’s office, Leonard wasn’t self-conscious about his educated manner of speech. But his mind kept up its play-by-play analysis of the contest under way. In order to be released from the hospital, Leonard had to make it clear that he wasn’t suicidal. He knew, however, that Dr. Shieu was on the lookout for any attempt to disguise suicidal ideation (suicidal people being brilliant tacticians when it came to obtaining the opportunity to kill themselves). Therefore, Leonard didn’t want to seem too upbeat. At the same time, he didn’t want to appear to be not getting better at all. As he answered the doctor’s questions, Leonard felt as though he were being interrogated for a crime. He tried, when he could, to tell the truth, but when the truth didn’t serve his cause he embellished it, or outright lie
d. He noted every change in Dr. Shieu’s facial expression, interpreting it as either favorable or unfavorable, and shifting his next response accordingly. Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet’s back.

  Visiting hours provided no relief. The friends who showed up divided into two groups. There were the emoters, mostly girls, who treated Leonard gingerly, as if he might break, and there were the jokesters, mostly guys, who thought the way to help him was to make fun of hospital visits in general. Jerry Heidmann brought him a saccharine get-well card, Ron Lutz a smiley-faced helium balloon. From the things that came out of his friends’ mouths during visiting hours Leonard gradually understood that they thought depression was like being “depressed.” They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it. People brought him chocolate bars. They urged him to consider all the good things in his life.

  True to form, neither of his parents flew out to see him. Frank called once, having been given his number by Janet. In the course of the short conversation (other patients were waiting to use the community phone), Frank told Leonard three separate times to “hang in there.” He invited Leonard to come to Brussels when he was feeling better. Frank was thinking of moving to Antwerp now and living on a house boat. “Come on over and we can make a little boat trip on the canals,” he said, before hanging up. Rita cited her herniated disk (the first he’d ever heard of it) for her inability to travel. She did speak with Dr. Shieu, however, and one night called Leonard on a phone at the nurses’ station. It was late, about ten p.m., but the night nurse let him take it.